Local Man, Delirious from Heatstroke, Writes about Blood-Drenched Mass Murder in Horror Comics. Film at 11.

Whooo dawg, the apartment is still cookin’ like an oven, and I feel like I been wrung out like a rag. The A/C is still dead, and taking cold showers and sleeping under fans didn’t really help me stay cool or sleep very well. So I don’t feel like reviewing any comics where happy things happen to happy people. I feel like reviewing comics where very, very, very bad things happen to people who weren’t very nice to begin with.

 

Crossed #0

A nice little prologue for Garth Ennis’ upcoming horror series. A pleasant evening out at the local diner suddenly turns into car crashes, plane crashes, a nuke, and bloody mass murder. This is basically a zombie story, except the butchers aren’t dead — they’re normal people who’ve caught some condition that turns them into gleefully psychotic killers. And the only way to tell them apart (aside from the severed body parts they tend to carry around and their evil, evil smiles) is the ugly red rash that forms a cross over their faces.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Mayhem and butchery? Gimme more o’ that. A nice claustrophobic, paranoid, ultra-violent beginning to the story. Can’t wait for the rest. Oh, and this is not a comic for kids. There is a great deal of violence and swearing and worse stuff that I’m not going to describe, because the head honchos here will protest. “You said you’d never use that word in combination with that word in describing that particular very rude act! Much less with a knife wound OR a kitten! For shame!” Fine, fine. Anyway, if you ain’t grown up enough to handle the rough stuff, don’t read it.

 

House of Mystery #4

Fig continues to try to adjust to her new life in the House of Mystery. She chats with a crazy ham enthusiast, fights with cranky Cress, and tries to beat up the house with a sledgehammer. Meanwhile, our spotlight story this issue is told by the punk witch princess Daphne — she tells about her flight from her witch-filled home dimension before the robotic invasion of the Thinking Man’s Army. To hide her properly, she, along with her bodyguard, a talking leopard named Floyd, gets teleported into a mundane world and deprived of her true name. To return home, all she has to do is kiss her true love and learn her true name. Unfortunately, she and Floyd have a great deal more fun just hacking up her boyfriends whenever they don’t make the cut.

Verdict: Thumbs up. The main story is a bit drab, but Daphne and Floyd are so fun and twisted and bloody and cynical, it pushes it straight over the top.