Thursday, August 6, 2015

MEDIAVORE: COMICS ~ "18 DAYS" #1, "CREEPY" #20


GRANT MORRISON'S 18 DAYS (Graphic India, $1.00) ~ Comics Renaissance Occultist Grant Morrison has been working on this Western-style re-telling of the great ancient Sanskrit epic Mahabharata (billed as Lord of the Rings with Star Wars technology) since 2010. Its first incarnation was as a series of animated shorts that showed up on Youtube without much fanfare or success in 2013. Viewership is still in the low five figures two year later, which must be a disappointment to investors considering that over a billion people are intimately familiar with the source material. Anyway, July of 2015 saw the rebirth of the work as a comic book, which quite frankly is a format that better suits the gravitas of the story. You want to be able to linger over and savor each panel, jam-packed as they are with beautifully rendered details. Art-wise, it's like Jack Kirby has taken a whack at Hindu mythology, which is a damn good idea when you think about it. And at a mere ONE DOLLAR per issue... how can you go wrong? Easily the best comic book value of the month, if not the year. I will definitely be picking up the rest of the series.


CREEPY #20 (Dark Horse, $3.99) ~ I remember the Creepy Magazine of my youth as being a much darker, more sinister affair than this collection of pet-related horror shorts, beefed up with a few inconsequential single-pagers from Peter Bagge. The highlight of this issue is a reprint of an old Rirchard Corben chestnut, presented here in full color. So it's not like I didn't enjoy this issue, or won't consider buying future issues, but I definitely would like to see a return to the pitch-black evil of the late 70's Warren title. Perhaps I'll give Dark Horse's recently released "Collected Creepy" volumes a try, when they come down in price. Who knows? Maybe I'm mis-remembering the tone?

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