Xombi #1 – Review

By: John Rozum (writer), Frazer Irving (artist)

The Story: Can some super-powered nuns and a guy who never needs to use the restroom work together to defeat a miniaturized serial killer?

The Review: Once a staple of comics, the horror genre has grown out of favor, nowadays only found among the less-trodden stands of indie publishers than the throng of titles from either the Big Two.  It’s the times that have changed; the threshold for what can horrify people has gotten a lot higher, and so many of even the mainstream series feature horror elements that it’s hard to generate enough potent, new ideas for a dedicated horror comic.

After reading the first issue of Xombi, you may be convinced that at least with Rozum at the helm, there’s plenty of fresh ideas to keep the title going for a long time.  Rozum first wrote the series back in the early nineties, and in this revival, you get a swift re-intro to the character and the grim origins of his powers, which seem just as compelling as when they first appeared.  But more than that, you get the sense this title offers something different from the rest of the pack.

Consider the opening events alone: a painted tiger mauling a cow in a completely different painting, chickens giving live birth, movie characters disappearing off the reel—as the talking heads on a quarter, a nickel, and some pennies indicate, these are all the signs of something even more unnatural to come.  Despite the small scale and not necessarily original nature of these things, Rozum strings them together in an effectively creepy way.

The title also gets a truly oddball cast of characters.  David Kim, the titular Xombi, is the least of it.  You also get a posse of metahuman Catholics, including a shrinking nun, one with clairvoyance, and a schoolgirl blessed with heavenly light.  Just to give you a sense of what kind of people you’re dealing with here, let me say they don’t flinch at much—even a shrunken prisoner impaled to a dollhouse wall with a normal-sized pair of scissors through her sternum.