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Comic Book Review: Swamp Thing # 1
Raise Dem Bones

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20110908095040_001 ZC Rating 4 of 7: Very Good

Frankly, I consider DC's The New 52! reboot a brilliant, but cheesy, marketing gimmick to boost sales. It will certainly do that, but I doubted much good would come out of freshening up the staple titles that make or break the House of DC every month, so I hadn't planned on picking up any of the number one issues; until I received a review copy of Scott Snyder and Yanick Paquette's Swamp Thing in the mail. Did it hit its mark? Sure did. Will I want to continue reading it? Sure will. I think you will want to, too.

Scott Snyder writes his stories by cutting between locations, situations, and people to build his plot's events. He's been damn lucky to have artists who seem to relish all that jumping around and keep up with him, but also add to his narrative in ways–framing, angles, positions of characters–he probably didn't even think of. Snyder's a very cinematically-minded writer in how he makes his stories build, and they have a completeness between issues, with clean, integral dialog, and visually important actions capping neatly at the given page length.

You get that sense of completeness reading this first Swamp Thing issue, Raise Dem Bones. We see birds dying in Metropolis, then bats dying in Gotham, then fish dying in the ocean in the space of 3 pages, switch to a disillusioned Dr. Holland doing a construction gig in Louisiana, and then visit an archeological dig in Arizona. It's the mastodon bones in the dig in Arizona that kick things into horror gear, and the 3 men who return to the dig at night get their necks all bent out of shape with what they find. Paquette doesn't really panel his art, it just wraps around and across the pages, word ballons and narrative blocks  like a rich vine. Snyder's dialog exchange between Dr. Holland and Superman, and the narrative embellishment to scenes are just enough, just right, and meld with the artwork. Or does the artwork meld with it?

Either way, this series is off to a very good start.

Comic Book Review: The Search for Swamp Thing 1

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0093_001 Zombos Says: Very Good

John Constantine smokes up a storm in the first of 3 issues for The Search for Swamp Thing. With only 20 pages to involve Batman and Zatanna, Jonathan Vankin and Marco Castiello keep Constantine moving before he can suffer from jet lag.

After the Swamp Thing sends a vibe to Constantine by way of the bloke's morning paper (try doing that on an iPad), it's a quick hop and half a pack to the Royal Botanic Gardens to commune more closely with "old lettuce-breath." The greenery takes Constantine's breath away instead, and leaves him with a spreading fungus tatoo for old time sake.

Lazy sot that he is, Constantine hooks up with Batman to do his legwork while a mobster impaled on a tree limb in a Gotham City junkyard may hold more clues as to what's making Daddy Iceburg Lettuce so petulant. In a tender moment of holding hands and frolicking in The Green's etherealness to commune with Swampy, Constantine winds up a few butts short and with a headache only Zatanna can make worse, what with their romance magic all zapped out and all, even with all that cleavage a-burgeoning (it's discretely shirted up for the issue's cover).

The art and story make Constantine a walking chimney of twitty droll wit armed with handy pocket magic spells, and keep this glummy mystery moving along briskly to the capper splash page lead-in for issue 2.

I just hope he can solve it before he finds out how much cigarettes cost here in the States and the page count drops again.

Comic Book Review: Bela Lugosi’s
Tales From the Grave 1

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Lugosi_tales Zombos Says: Very Good

Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi would have been very happy.

Monsterverse's Bela Lugosi's Tales From the Grave, issue one, is campy, slick, and skillfully old-fashioned. It also has eye-pleasing artwork, coloration, and perhaps a tad too much verbosity to tell some of its stories (but not as much as the EC Horror Comic Books did); except for A Strangely Isolated Place, which tells its story in a splendidly macabre dance between art and sparse words.

Then again, it's this preponderance of words, neatly arranged within panels, which gives Tales From the Grave its nostalgic tone, seeping with the ill humours of acid-browning Warren magazines like Creepy and Eerie.

Quirky and short art stories, which include John Cassaday's humorous, black and white cartoon experiment gone haywire, and Joe Friere's Twisted ToyFare Theatre-styled (with a Pete Von Sholly bent) The Further Adventures of Dr. Vornoff and Lobo, take measured chances while providing a stylistic variety.

Rob E. Brown's Mark of the Zombie, a sepia-toned extravagance of Haitian Voodoo and putrefying zombies looks like a Ripley's Believe It or Not excerpt, but reads like a graphic novel. Unpleasant Side Effects, the lead off story drawn by Kerry Gammill and scripted by Sam F. Park, is a fun throwback reminiscent of DC's The Witching Hour, and Marvel's Tower of Shadows. Once again a mad scientist does his thing, but there's a happy ending–sort of.

Nosferina and Bela, with a small assist from Hugo the hideous, introduce the stories, although Bela steps in here and there, especially in the last story, Midnight Museum. Think wax museum and you'll have an inkling of what he's up to. Gary D. Rhodes intertwines the Lugosi and Dracula mystique in a two-page article to bring the curtain down on issue one.

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Monsterverse does a remarkable job in capturing the sinister, but strangely approachable, essence that makes Bela Lugosi an icon for horror's golden age and beyond. Bela Lugosi's Tales From the Grave is everything Dark Horse's Creepy should be.

Dark Horse, you've been served.

Comic Book Review: Victorian Undead
Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula 1

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Vicundead2Zombos Says: Good

After defeating Professor Moriarty’s army of zombies in Victorian Undead, Holmes and Watson are confronted with the puzzle of what happened to the Demeter’s ill-fated crew. Called on by Lloyd’s of London to investigate, the world’s first consulting detective and his faithful Boswell will soon learn there are far worse things awaiting them than zombies.

Or will they?

While the story is crisply paced, with Ian Edginton carefully dropping period elements (like references to the Lutine Bell and Shank’s pony) into his pages, his Holmes and Watson seem to be falling into a Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce relationship. I do love them in the Universal Studios’ movie series (especially the cleverly updated ones), but it doesn’t match the tone of what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote and tends to undermine the strengths of both characters in this graphic novel format.

Tom Mandrake’s single page depicting Dracula aboard ship stands out dramatically from Fabbri’s smooth, tidy lines for London and therein lies another departure from the quintessential element of the Holmes’ Canon: Victorian London’s shadowy byways, cramped quarters, foggy and sooty streets, and colorful denizens. Fabbri puts everything through the dry cleaners instead, including Holmes.

Look at the splash page (click to enlarge) and you’ll see a surprisingly neat and orderly crowd in the hustle and bustle. Doyle once remarked that London was “the great cesspool into which the loungers and the idlers are irresistibly drained.” Granted much of that cesspool was raised by fire in the first volume of Victorian Undead, in an effort to stop the zombies, but Fabbri’s penchant for commercial cleanliness throughout his panels spills over onto Holmes, whose “bohemian” habits and lifestyle, as Watson wrote, are nowhere to be seen.

Perhaps I’m overly spoiled by watching the Granada television series and Jeremy Brett’s virtuoso eccentricities. Looking at Fabbri’s opening splash page , I know he can muster more of that atmoshpheric energy across the next four issues.

Come on Fabbri, give us some foggy streets at least.