(no subject)
I haven't done a comic book review here in a while. Something I enjoyed a lot and was surprised to is "House of Mystery", a revival of the old anthology horror series by Bill Willingham and Matt Sturges. It's actually mostly Matt Sturges, who is a pretty new writer but who is pretty great. Regular comic readers will recognize Willingham as the writer of "Fables" and Sturges as the writer of the spin-off series "Jack of Fables", neither of which I've read but it is hard not to hear about them in comics press. So I read the first trade of House of Mystery, which was subtitled "Room and Boredom" and it was excellent. The premise is really simple, the protagonist, Bethany, an architect, is running from something and finds herself in a living house populated with weird fantasy characters, all of whom have been trapped in the house for unknown reasons. It's a kind of purgatory that a variety of eccentric folk and fantasy characters fall in to. They all spend a lot of time at the bar and have to pay for their drinks by telling stories. This is the fun part of the series:every time of the bar's occupants tells a story (usually the story of how they ended up in the house, or some insane and hyperbolic biographical story) it turns into a little mini-story-within-a-story with a new artist for about five pages, before reverting back to the main artist (Luca Rossi) and the primary, framing story. I am a sucker for done-in-one stories, and for stories-within-stories (But I mean, not stories-within-stories-within-stories in a Flann O'brien kind of way, two layers is enough for me, like bean dip.) It's basically just a really well done, classic Vertigo horror-fantasy series very reminiscent of "Sandman" except without Neil Gaiman's heavy-handed morals and naval-gazing. And it's FUNNY, which is the main reason I recommend it. All of the mini-stories made me chuckle, like the Princess who has her true name hidden from her and is banished from her kingdom by her mother the queen until she can kiss her true love, who settles for being a kind of S&M serial killer. ("I vageuly recall not liking my true name anyway")There is also occasional prose back-matter that provides a running subplot.
The original House of Mystery was a horror series narrated by macabre versions of Cain and Abel, who lived in the eponymous house. (Actually Abel, I think, lived in a neighboring house, the House of Secrets, which had its own series as well) I read some of the stories in black and white Showcase TPB's and they were kind of bad, but clearly provided an early antecedent for what would be the Vertigo line some 40 years later.
The original House of Mystery was a horror series narrated by macabre versions of Cain and Abel, who lived in the eponymous house. (Actually Abel, I think, lived in a neighboring house, the House of Secrets, which had its own series as well) I read some of the stories in black and white Showcase TPB's and they were kind of bad, but clearly provided an early antecedent for what would be the Vertigo line some 40 years later.