For this installment of Heroes and Villains we’ve got a spooky ghost girl, and a sinister farm where nothing is as it seems! Now let’s see what kind of column I can scare up!
Advance Alert!
Little Girl #1
Pat Shand (W)
Olivia Pelaez (A)
Devil’s Due Comics
I love a good ghost story and I love this comic. Bam! Column over! Thanks for reading everybody!
Oh, you’re still here… Well, I suppose I should continue to sing the praises of this book.
So. Ghost stories. I’ve voraciously consumed ghost stories for almost as long as I’ve been able to read. I could feed you some line about how much I appreciate that they’re really just mirrors for society and how they speak to the human condition and whatnot, but the truth is that I just love being creeped out.
Out in July from Devil’s Due Comics is Pat Shand and Olivia Pelaez’s Little Girl which has an atmosphere that reminds me of all the best creepy stuff I’ve every read. The way the story unfolds in the first issue is masterfully balanced between moments of the mundane (a couple video chatting) and CREEPING DREAD (a sinister…uh, creeping shadow).
It’s no spoiler that the titular Little Girl of the book is a ghost girl, which as horror fans know is a genre unto itself. Up until reading this book I would have told you that the ghost kid trope was totally played out and I’m now fully willing to admit how wrong I was.
The book has some great scares and I was pleasantly surprised how much story they were able to pack into just the first issue. Pat Shand also included conversations with comics creators in the back matter of the book where they talk about The Unexplained and I can’t quite express how much I loved this added detail of the book. Everyone has a ghost story and there’s something incredibly intimate and chilling seeing them committed to the page like that.
Adavance Alert!
Farmhand #1
Rob Guillory (W/A)
Taylor Wells (C)
Image Comics
Coming in July from Image is Farmhand from Rob Guillory… a book about a farm that grows hands. Well, that’s an incredible disservice to the book. The farm grows thing other than hands. But I’m getting A HEAD of myself. I’ll stop now.
The plot of the book centers on an estranged son and his family going back to his father’s farm. Pretty straight forward stuff until it’s revealed that the father has unlocked the secret to growing “transplant-ready farm-grown organs.” That’s pretty much all I can safely divulge without spoiling the book.
Farmhand never went where I expected to go and that was completely refreshing. It was creepy, gross, and also surprisingly funny for a book where organs grow on trees. I ended up being totally on board with the concept and the book by the end of the first issue and I wasn’t ready for the book to end.
So, check out Farmhand, you’ll really DIG it…and that’s one to GROW on.
Man….the editor in chief is totally going to fire me for that one…
Screaming Into The Void
If you’ve made it this far…thanks for reading! I desperately want to know what YOU are reading these days. Aside from this column and what we post about here, I exist largely in a comics vacuum.
Comics ‘journalism” these days is pretty much all about what site can spoil the biggest Marvel/DC/Image book the soonest. So, some months back I decided to unfollow all the comics news outlets and, I have to say, it’s been pretty rewarding.
However, because of that I’m really not seeing how comics fans are reacting to things now. Are people reading DC’s Doomsday Clock? It comes out so infrequently, I’m often forgetting that it’s a thing that exists. I’m of two minds of that book: on one side, Watchmen should be left alone. But on the other…I kind of like that the very existence of the book makes the original writer cranky. (Full disclosure: DC did him dirty way, way back in the 1980’s and he’s more than right to be upset with whatever they decide to do with his work)
Anyways…whatcha readin’?
