Ryan B does Dog Days

Let me just start out by saying that Charles Burns is one of my favorite artists, comic book, or otherwise. His simplistic, cartoony style blends a 1950's aesthetic with grotesque freakishness in a way no one else can. In my last review I told you all about one of the best writers of horror comics, Bruce Jones, so I thought that it was only appropriate that this time I would focus on one of the best artists of horror comics. Not that Burns isn't also a great writer, he writes and draws all his own stuff, but it's primarily his art that has made him such a recognizable talent.

Today we will be subjecting ourselves to one of his best, most well known stories (besides Black Hole) that comes from the graphic novel Skin Deep, originally published by Penguin Books in 1992. It's a bizarre little chew toy called...

Dog Days.

Ryan B does Infected

Not long before Warren Publishing closed shop in 1983, putting CREEPY and EERIE to bed, one of their best writers, Bruce Jones, set out to start his own horror comic. The result was the gloriously ghoulish Twisted Tales published by Pacific Comics in 1982. The series only ran for ten issues, but is well remembered even today by many fans of the genre for the boundaries it pushed in its short time. 

Jones himself is the first to admit in his introduction to issue number one, that Twisted Tales is a complete throwback to the EC comics of the 1950's that he grew up reading, but with a much more mature sensibility that he no doubt picked up working on the Warren books of the seventies that were able to include more sex and adult language than the older EC ones ever were. I think you'll see what I mean by "mature sensibilities" as I review the very first story of the very first issue in this line. It's a contagious little heat rash aptly titled...

Infected

Ryan B does The Field

So for my first review I gave you a classic EC story from the golden age of horror comics. This time around I thought I'd go to the other extreme, being such an extreme person myself, and give you something a little more current in order to show you how that old gruesome and gleeful spirit is still alive in hell, or rather, alive and well in the comic market of today.

For those living under a rock (or six feet of dirt) for the last three years, let me bring you up... to date. in 2009 Dark Horse Comics set out to breath new life into the cobweb covered corpse of CREEPY Magazine, which had laid long dormant since its original publisher, Warren Publishing, went out of business in 1983. Since it's triumphant return from the grave it has continued to do what any re-animated dead thing would: scare the crap out of people. With old Uncle Creepy himself once again at the helm, the new CREEPY picked things up pretty much exactly where it left off all those decades ago. So without further a-goo, let's take a look at one of its recent offerings. A piece of fresh meat called...

The Field.