The Gathering: Pulp Heroes – Review

By: Too many to list, or even to review—check out the issue.

The Story: One serving of comic book stories, please—extra pulp.

The Review: Much as I’ve appreciated what GrayHaven’s trying to do with its anthologies, I’ve always found them a little misguided in execution.  With each contributor only getting three or four pages to himself, the most he can deliver is not a fully-formed story, but something closer to a sketch or a thought-piece.  In a comic, three to four pages are enough for a few good jokes and maybe an interesting visual/idea, but you it’s hard to get a proper beginning, middle, and end.

This is why the vast majority of Gathering features tend to feel frustratingly insubstantial; the writers attempt to do too much with their three or four pages of exposure and sell themselves short as a result.  The ones who find the most measure of success use their limited time efficiently, setting up and delivering a good punchline, but largely avoiding any greater depth than that.  They simply don’t have the space to spare for that kind of thing.

The Gathering: Ghost Stories – Review

By: Too many to list, and too many to even review—check out the issue.

The Story: I just get this haunting feeling that we’re not alone here.

The Review: It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, hasn’t it?  The fault is entirely mine.  I’m not much of a digital reading kind of person (for now); GrayHaven comics aren’t readily available at my shop; and frankly, I’m not convinced that I really want to go out of my way to obtain any.  As admirable as GrayHaven’s objectives may be, they haven’t really produced anything you’d consider truly remarkable.

They only suffer even further by comparison to their more polished, bigger-name peers, and unfortunately, Vertigo’s Ghosts is a direct parallel to this latest volume of The Gathering.  On a purely structural level, Ghosts already has a leg up on this issue in Vertigo’s choice to allow for longer features, generally resulting in more substantial, satisfying tales.  It’s the difference between eating a Hershey’s Kiss and a Hershey bar; neither fill you up like a full-blown meal, but one at least keeps you happy for a longer time afterward.