This week’s main review is Seance in the Asylum #1, another spooky season release. Plus, the Wednesday Comics Team has its usual rundown of the new #1s, endings and other notable issues from non-Big 2 publishers, all of which you can find below… enjoy!

Seance in the Asylum #1

Writer: Clay McLeod Chapman
Artist: Leonardo Marcello Grassi
Colorist: Mauro Gulma
Letterer: Frank Cvetkovic
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics

October, the greatest month of the year for horror fans, is well and truly underway and this comic is one I’ve been looking forward to ever since it was announced. Superstar horror novelist Clay McLeod Chapman (Whisper Down The Lane) is making his creator-owned comics debut for Dark Horse Comics. Set in 1865, this series is focused on a defrauded clairvoyant named Alicia Witkinson, who is given a second chance at her career – by having to go into a mental institution and ‘draw out’ the mental maladies of the patients.

Novelists who begin to work on comics often fall into bad tendencies of being too prose driven, or narratively dense. This isn’t the case here. McLeod Chapman writes this as if it’s second nature to him. It’s a very self-assured, confident debut. The story has quite a bit of set-up, but never feels dense. The dialogue is snappy and focused, and the narration is too. Alicia is a fantastic character, a flawed and interesting protagonist. She is indeed a fraud like people accuse her to be, but she’s placed in a situation where the patients are genuinely acting as if they’re possessed. I am 100% on board this book already, because there is just so much rife narrative conflict there that I’m sure the creative team will deliver on.

The artwork by Leonardo Marcello Grassi It’s astounding. His sketchy, line-heavy style reminds me of classic Vertigo comic books, and it suits a book like this beautifully. He’s incredibly good at emphasizing the scary, haunting moments in the story and manages to make every individual character stand out in a setting and time period where most characters are wearing similar items of clothing to each other. The color work by Mauro Gulma wonderfully compliments Grassi’s artwork, with the two jumping out of the page and standing out as one of the best parts of an already great book. The covers of this book too, by artist Andrea Muttithey are beautifully haunting.

If I have one fault with this book, it is minor at best – Frank Cvetkovic‘s letters are great all the way through, but he does succumb to using unclear ‘handwritten’ fonts during some of the narration, which can be quite hard to read. There is a reason that style stopped being used in comics, sadly, although I get the narrative intention of it here. This book is pretty intense, and its letters generally help convey the important information needed so that the story can get fully up and running by the end of the issue.

Overall though, Seance in the Asylum It is thrilling, intriguing and scary. It’s got its own unique identity which is uncommon in today’s age, and is shaping up to be an essential horror comic read for me. Clay McLeod Chapman’s comics debut succeeds with flying colors, and I cannot wait to see what else he does going forward. The rest of the creative team on this book shine, and it’s an engaging and essential horror read for this year’s spooky season.

Wednesday Comics Reviews

Day of the Dead Girl #1 (Magma Comix): A vibrant first issue full of color and style with art by Belen Culebras and colors by Dearbhla Kelly, Day of the Dead Girl you introduce a fun mother/daughter dynamic and the significance of Dia De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) in its first few pages as Ana and her daughter Sam go back and forth about the importance of the holiday and their respective reverence for it. Sam is resentful and upon discovering why, it makes sense, although Ana has been having a rough go at life recently and you can see that tension and feel for both characters and that’s heightened with sharp dialogue and writing from AJ Mendez & Aimee Garcia with letters by Shawn Lee. There’s a great sense of back and forth and then there’s intriguing tonal shifts from the vibrance of Dia De Los Muertos to something more sinister and an elevation of the real, using the supernatural to further the divide between Ana, a witch (witch) and Sam’s refusal to be involved in the practice(s) of brujeria. The push and pull is so clear and that makes the final pages such a strong ending note setting up what’s to come. —Khalid Johnson
Murder Kingdom #1 (Mad Cave Studios): What if the “happiest place on earth” became ground zero for a storybook-themed serial killer? That is the question posed by the first issue of Murder Kingdom as written by Fred Van Lente. With hints of workers’ rights, uncaring corporate overlords, and an ungratefully ignorant public, this mystery has quite the ways to go to reach its happy ending. Colorful art by Chris Panda highlights the glitz and glamor of huge theme parks of this variety, all while showcasing the golden-paved roads that tourists trod on are nothing but cheap paint. With letters by Becca Carey To showcase the last screams of our victims and every other sound found in a theme park, the issue presents itself with quite the mystery left for the princess detective to solve. —Bryan Reheil

Night of the Slashers #1 (Magma Comix): While Night of the Slashers’ premise is familiar enough and its scope maps out an enjoyable run for the series, the book perhaps over-relies on a major conceptual twist. writer Cavan Scott may have built a hated character that gets a swift comeuppance, but starting the series on page one with a woman who gets murdered by sneaking out to hookup feels like a vestige of bygone horror eras. Bundle in jumpscares on page turns that lack atmosphere, because the visual pacing is interrupted by panel-clogging expositional dialogue, and the book feels a bit tepid toward its own genre conventions. Sure, Paul Fry draws teen archetypes with aplomb, but with such evenly sized non-formalist panels, there’s a wealth of narrative tools left unused to communicate this story [spacing, scale, contrast, etc]so we’re left with dialogue primarily driving the story. The first big jump scare goes for a color palette that recedes instead of the sudden contrasting palette swap trick we’ve seen before, but it still manages to underdeliver by revealing so much information before the page turn. I love horror comics, but this is mid…and mid is unfortunately a difficult sell in today’s comic market. —Beau Q.

Toxic Avengers #1 (AHOY Comics): Artist Fred Harper you have done a lot of underrated work for AHOY Comics at this point, from working on the publisher’s Wrong Earth comics to the offbeat and absolutely excellent, stand-up comedy culture send-up, Snelson: Comedy is Dying. And now AHOY has turned Harper loose on a new series starring The Toxic Avenger where he is colored to perfection by Lee Loughridge as he illustrates a pithy and clever script from Matt borswith letters by Rob Steen. This book is a nice little read that feels accessible to new readers while still honoring the franchise’s past (would you believe The Toxic Avenger is 40 years old this year?!). But after reading, what I kept thinking about was the art. It’s the star of this show from page one, a gross (complementary) close-up on our lead character. Don’t miss it. —Zack Quaintance

The Prog Report

2000 AD 2403 (Rebellion Publishing): A new lead Judge Dredd story starts this week with Judge Dredd: Hater from writer Ken Niemand, artist Silvia Califano, colorist Giulia Brusco, and letterer Annie Parkhouse. And it’s a follow-up to one of the most-beloved Dredd stories ever, The Apocalypse War. It’s a story that seems interested in showing that there are no winners in war, and that the damages done to a society and its people by violent conflict have a way of spider-webbing out through generations to hurt us all for decades to come. That’s pretty ambitious territory to be working in. I think the creative team here does a good job with the first chapter. As well-known as The Apocalypse War is they do a good job of orienting readers who maybe haven’t read it for many years, grounding a flashback sequence in the experience of a sympathetic lead character. Plus, not to spoil it but this first chapter ends on a very interesting splash page. In brief, I am very much here for this. As always, you can nab a digital copy of this week’s Prog here. —Zack Quaintance