Doc Macabre #3 – Review

By: Steve Niles (writer), Bernie Wrightson (art), Tom Smith (colors), Shawn Lee (letters) & Tom Waltz (editor)

The Story: Doc Macabre gets to the bottom of the hauntings plaguing his town.

What’s Good: What a great little 3-issue story this was.  I’m not sure I’d call it horror, because it isn’t scary or gory.  It’s more like a Ghostbusters with great art.  Over these three issue Niles and Wrightson have worked as a solid team to develop a precocious monster hunter by the name of Doc Macabre and his personable robot assistant Lloyd (who looks like a lamp).  In this issue they come to deal with an appropriately creepy bad guy who has been causing all these hauntings and zombie infestations in their town and take him down.  It is just a cute and fun story that I urge you to seek out whenever IDW collects these three issues.  Let’s support original material, folks!

The big lure for me in trying this series in the first place was the Wrightson name on the cover and he doesn’t disappoint.  As comic fans we’ve grown accustom to seeing our favorite creators of our youth just kinda lose it.  Sometimes their quality actually goes downhill and sometimes they just fail to adapt with the times, but Mr. Wrightson is still just knocking it out of the park.  Based on his lifetime body of work and this series where he demonstrates that he’s still at the top of his game, we should all be buying anything with his name on it.  There is nothing to find fault with in the art for this series: great layouts, incredible inks, useful panel designs, good use of background (or lack thereof).  It’s all just wonderful stuff.  Well executed coloring too!

Doc Macabre #2 – Review

By: Steve Niles (writer), Bernie Wrightson (art), Tom Smith (colors), Neil Uyetake (letters) & Tom Waltz (editor)

The Story: Young Doc Macabre ties to deal with a ghostly uprising.

What’s Good: Lookie who the artist is: Bernie Wrightson.  He is legitimately one of the real masters of the comic art form to come along in the last 50 years.  If you haven’t heard of him, take a second on Google Images and then come back to this review.

So, if the name “Wrightson” is enough to make me instantly grab a book off the shelf, is there a story in here good enough to justify having an artist of his caliber around?  It turns out there is.  Steve Niles has written a fun story where a precociously gifted young man with an angelic face has chosen to turn his talents into being a kind of Ghostbuster.  He invents all sorts of weird things and then hires himself out to take care of ghosts and zombies.  Only he is really inexperienced and seems to still have some of that teenage immortality that causes him to get in a little over his heard at times.  It has some horror themes, but isn’t a scary or gory tale.

But, I think a lot of this writing is Niles, lobbing meatballs for Wrightson to smash out of the park: “Here, draw a NAKED GHOST!  And then draw Doc Macabre in a funky science suit!”

Returning to the art, one of the reasons I like to review comics is to share the things that I love with other people and I love Mr. Wrightson’s art.  His storytelling and sense of how to frame a scene are just impeccable.  He has a glorious sense of how to shade objects to convey contours or shininess.  And the detail… Absolutely awesome. While his panel-to-panel work is really something, there are a few splash images in here (such as one that shows the Doc messing with a new invention) that’ll just knock your socks off.  It is just so nice to see an artist submitting finished linework for the colorist to work with because a lot of modern artists leave a lot of the heavily lifting in terms of contours and shading.

WCBR Quick Hit Reviews – Week of 12/15/2010

Sometimes we get a few more comics than we can review in full, so here are the balance of the comics read by the WCBR staff, some good, and some pretty bad.

Thunderbolts #151 – This was a great little story that tells the origin of Ghost (for those who care of such things).  Again, Jeff Parker smashes an incredible amount of story into a normal sized comic.  Goodness do I wish he could rub off on some of his fellow Marvel creators (e.g. Fraction, Matt).  At the end, you’re crystal clear on why Ghost hates corporations and you really don’t blame him.  Very nice art by Kev Walker! Grade: B+ — Dean Stell

Doc Macabre #1 – Why buy this odd horror comic from IDW?  Well, it is drawn by Bernie Wrightson and that is reason enough for me.   Wrightson is a Hall of Fame-level comic artist who still has his fastball.  This comic looks great!  As for the story, it is about some young ghost hunter guy (Doc Macabre) who uses his wizardry and gadgets to get rid of ghosts and zombies for money.  Story is entertaining, but nothing spectacular.  Worth buying if you love beautiful sequential art.  Grade: B — Dean Stell

Captain America: Man Out of Time #2 – By Mark Waid (writer), Jorge Molina (pencils), Karl Kesel (inks), Frank D’Armata (colors), VC’s Joe Sabino (letters) I’m already on record as loving the premise of this book, and this issue has me loving the execution right along with it. Although Cap’s wild and rather exaggerated mood swings could have very easily come across as silly or out of character, Waid brings out just the right note in each episode to not only keep them realistic, but to use them to reinforce Steve Rogers’ essential humanity. (After all, who WOULDN’T go just a little bit nuts after being unfrozen, time-traveled, and brought face to face with an alien in the same two or three hour time span!) Special note has to be taken of the short but very sweet scene where Cap discovers his personal proof that he is not trapped in a dream. Moments like that, while possible in other mediums, are what make comics so special. A perfect marriage of a single, powerful static image and piece of dialog that packs (a rather unexpected) emotional punch. Very well done, and well worth picking up.  Grade: B — SoldierHawk