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.

Weekly Comic Book Review’s Top Picks

Dean’s Top Picks

Best From The Past Week: Bulletproof Coffin #6 – What a great ending to a creator-owned series!  What started out as a send-up of the pre-comics code era finished with a biting satire of creator’s selling out the intellectual property rights to their characters for a paycheck.  Just awesome.  Runner-up: Detective Comics #872

Most Anticipated: The Walking Dead #80 – It looks like the wait is over.  The zombies haven’t gotten to munch on humans for a couple of years in TWD, but that looks to change in this issue.  It should be intense and I kinda wonder if any of my favorite characters is going to end up as zombie poo.

Other Picks: I, Zombie #9, Doc Macabre #2, 27 #2, Marineman #2, Who is Jake Ellis #1, She-Hulks #3

 

DS’ Top Picks

Best From The Past Week: Batman: The Dark Knight #1 – David Finch, on both art and story made Batman: The Dark Knight #1 my favorite comic of last week. Art was beautiful. The story worked well. I’ve in for issue #2.

Most Anticipated: Brightest Day #17. Are you kidding me? The Hawkman and Hawkgirl subplots is one of my favorite ones in Brightest Day, not just for the artwork. I’m digging the eternal lovers and their immortal enemy and am anxious (although it won’t happen in this issue) to see how all this fits together with Blackest Night and Brightest Day.

Other Picks: Adventure Comics #522, Secret Six #29, Avenger Prime #5, Captain America: Hail Hydra #1, X-Factor #213, Heroes for Hire #2