So, when I did my first review of a story from Twisted Tales,
I picked a bit of a stinker. This may have given some of you new to horror
comics the idea that this book or maybe Bruce Jones specifically, is not so
great. Well, that’s not true. My review of Jenifer should have been enough to
show you that Bruce Jones is a genius and one of, if not THE best, in his
field. Now I want to show you one of his best, most classic stories from
Twisted Tales (which, on the whole, was a consistently great book all around).
No, it’s not the infamous Banjo Lessons, although we’ll no doubt get to that one
eventually. No, this is a little story about not fitting in called…
Majority Of One.
A man – a wolfman – winces and howls in pain as a bullet
grazes his shoulder. It comes from the gun of a man who is part of a mob
chasing the creature. Quickly recovering from the pain, the werewolf runs towards
some nearby woods and heads inside.
He’s able to dodge the bullets better in the thick forest,
but soon he has bigger troubles when he steps into a bear trap.
It only slows him
down a little, but it’s long enough for the pursuers to catch up, which was its
purpose. The werewolf frees himself quickly and turns to run again, but slips
and falls down a ravine. He lays there for a while at the bottom listening to
the sounds of the hunter’s and their dogs. Finally he draws his strength and
gets to his feet. He sees a nearby cave and heads inside of it just in time to
avoid the mob as they pass by over head. They look down into the ravine and see
nothing, so they move on. The cave isn’t unoccupied, however, and the wolfman
soon finds himself wrestling a bear. He sinks his fangs into the animal’s
throat.
The bear is no match for Wolfy’s superhuman strength and
dies without much fight. Several hours later, after he’s sure that the mob
chasing him has moved on, the creature leaves his shelter and heads towards the
smell of food.
Shortly he comes upon a beautiful woman in a clearing near a
shack getting water from a stone well. He’s enamored with her and watches her
go inside her home with the water, and then he creepily watches her through the
window.
The woman decides to live up to every horror movie cliché she
can, and takes her blonde ass outside to investigate a strange noise in the
dark. Suddenly out of nowhere comes, not a wolfman, but a manman.
He doesn’t find this strange or anything, so he follows her
inside where she explains that she heard about him on the radio. Apparently
he’s the “last one left”. She offers him some coffee. As she serves him, the
man asks her if she is afraid of him. She tells him yes, but it doesn’t make a
difference since there’s no way she could keep him out. She tells him that she
has a child named Amy in the next room and asks him how he has survived so long
while the others were wiped out long ago. He says he’s a survivor and then asks
her name. She says, “No names”. When he asks why she says that he won’t live much
longer and she doesn’t want to remember the name of the man who made love to
her and then died.
“Are we going to make love?” he asks.
“Are we what? Don’t you want to?”
“Yes. Do you?”
This awkward conversation is interrupted by her daughter
calling her from the next room.
The woman explains that her husband was shot dead four
months ago because of what he was and now they’re watching the house, but so
far no one knows about the wolf baby, they just suspect it. She says that her
husband was a general during the war and then afterwards they opened the door
one day and his own men came in and shot him.
“Funny how quickly people ‘forget’ once you’re no longer one
of the majority.”
She says that one of his own family members betrayed him in
exchange for their own life. She asks her guest if he thinks that’s terrible.
He says he might do the same in a similar situation. She strips naked and
continues, saying that the only reason they hated her husband and the reason
they also hate her guest is because they’re impure, only hairy half the time.
If they were just one way it would be different, but they’re inconsistent and
it’s the inconsistency people hate. The two lay naked together on the bed about
to have sex when suddenly the door is thrown open and the angry mob of hunters
burst in. The man realizes too late that the woman was only distracting him
until they showed up. She’s the one who betrayed her husband and now betrayed
him. The mob opens fire.
As he lies dead next to her the woman says, “Impure.”
The mob then turns their guns on her.
“My baby…you promised to spare my baby if I told…you promised
to take care of my baby….”
They blow her away too and then…
Their mission done, the mob leaves the shack and one of them
gets in his truck to head home. He drives down his normal street full of normal
houses comfortable in the knowledge that the last bunch of impure ones is gone.
He gets out of his normal truck and heads into his normal house to greet his
normal family and…
They’re werewolves!
Get it?
I love this story. It’s so cheesy, but so effective. It
reminds me of one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes, Eye Of The Beholder.
In this world where wolfman is the norm, it is the hairless man that is the
freak. The detailed artwork by Val Mayerik really helps to bring the story to
life and the color is especially vivid and bright. The blues and reds in
particular stand out to me. I don’t know if there’s a symbolism to that or not
and I don’t really care. This is a comic book after all, so let’s not over
think it too much, but let’s at least think about the message of the story and
our own ideas about what is normal and what isn’t.
I give this tale an 8 out of 10 Werthams.
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