By: Steve Niles (writer), Bernie Wrightson (art), Tom Smith (colors), Neil Uyetake (letters) & Tom Waltz (editor)
The Story: Young Doc Macabre ties to deal with a ghostly uprising.
What’s Good: Lookie who the artist is: Bernie Wrightson. He is legitimately one of the real masters of the comic art form to come along in the last 50 years. If you haven’t heard of him, take a second on Google Images and then come back to this review.
So, if the name “Wrightson” is enough to make me instantly grab a book off the shelf, is there a story in here good enough to justify having an artist of his caliber around? It turns out there is. Steve Niles has written a fun story where a precociously gifted young man with an angelic face has chosen to turn his talents into being a kind of Ghostbuster. He invents all sorts of weird things and then hires himself out to take care of ghosts and zombies. Only he is really inexperienced and seems to still have some of that teenage immortality that causes him to get in a little over his heard at times. It has some horror themes, but isn’t a scary or gory tale.
But, I think a lot of this writing is Niles, lobbing meatballs for Wrightson to smash out of the park: “Here, draw a NAKED GHOST! And then draw Doc Macabre in a funky science suit!”
Returning to the art, one of the reasons I like to review comics is to share the things that I love with other people and I love Mr. Wrightson’s art. His storytelling and sense of how to frame a scene are just impeccable. He has a glorious sense of how to shade objects to convey contours or shininess. And the detail… Absolutely awesome. While his panel-to-panel work is really something, there are a few splash images in here (such as one that shows the Doc messing with a new invention) that’ll just knock your socks off. It is just so nice to see an artist submitting finished linework for the colorist to work with because a lot of modern artists leave a lot of the heavily lifting in terms of contours and shading.
Finally, let’s give IDW some kudos for putting out stories like this. As comics move towards a new paradigm in the digital age, I pretty firmly believe that you’re going to have to publish something besides superhero stories to remain viable. IDW does a great job with these horror series.
What’s Not So Good: There is nothing wrong with the story. I doubt it’ll be anything that is going to become a timeless classic in the future, but there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just two very talented and experienced creators telling a horror-infused story.
If I were to pick at the art at all, it is that I almost wish that some of the pages in this issue were black and white or perhaps just done with flat colors. It isn’t to say that the coloring is bad (at all) and there are a number of places where the shaded coloring adds things that you wouldn’t be able to convey as well on a B&W page and the colorist has also been very faithful to the inking from Mr. Wrightson, but still… Probably just a personal preference thing that I’d love to just see Mr. Wrightson’s lines on a page.
Conclusion: A quality horror story with don’t-miss-it art. Hell, even if you don’t think you like horror-type stories, just call it $3.99 for a Bernie Wrightson sketchbook and you’ll be happy.
Grade: B+
– Dean Stell
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Conclusion