Wednesday, 19 August 2009

The Horror!

So, apart from clunky old Green Lantern stories, what have I been reading? Horror mostly. Yup, I'm on a definite ghoulish tip at the mo. Reread some of the classic old stories from Creepy Archives #1. Not enough for me, so I snagged a second hand copy of volume two for twenty quid online. Hopefully that'll arrive in time to sate my lust for '60s terror tales. There's real black magic at play in those old Warren comics, I'm telling you.

In the meantime, I'm making do with current day chillers. Walking Dead Volume 10 took me all of half an hour to blast through and, as usual, left me feeling like I needed to watch an episode of The Cosby Show or some other similarly pleasant sit-com to restore my sense of well-being and mental balance.

Honestly, every volume of this book gets progressively more depressing. All of the main adult characters have now reached varying degrees of insanity, while the children are completely and utterly fucked up. Still, top notch stuff. Although, given that it takes about five minutes to read through a single issue, I don't know how anyone manages to read it on a monthly basis.

There's a less visceral sort of horror going on in Warren Ellis' Frankenstein's Womb. Indeed, I suppose you could argue that this piece of biographical fiction isn't horror at all. It's not a Frankenstein's Monster story really, (although he does narrate the story), but rather an examination of the forces at work in Mary Wollstonecraft's life that led her to write Frankenstein. Given that those forces are the very same ones that underpin Frankenstein itself, I think it's fair enough to call this a horror story. Marek Oleksicki's art, (which draws on the classic look of Bernie Wrightson and Angelo Torres at their most ghastly), certainly imbues it with a suitably gothic look.

It's a great piece of work which I rated highly enough to try and get my comics hating girlfriend to read. She passed on it, her loss. What with this, Crecy and Aetheric Mechanics, I think it's safe to say that Warren Ellis is doing his best work for Avatar at the moment.

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