Review: Tales of the Unexpected #1
The cover, by Mike Mignola. Nobody expects a Mike Mignola cover!Expect the Unexpected! But also expect SPOILERS
Tales... of the Unexpected! The name might be familiar to British readers- it was Roald Dahl's TV showcase for his short stories that ran on ITV from 1979 to 1988. This is a little different though...
The main thrust of the comic is The Spectre, with a back-up story with skeptical paranormal investigator Doctor Thirteen, which is a shame since Doc's story blows away the A-feature with superior writing and artwork, but we'll get to that in a minute.
Recapping the history of The Spectre would make my eyes bleed, so here's all you need to know to get up to speed: The Spectre is God's spirit of Vengence, capital V very much intended. If you do something wrong, The Spectre dishes out an ironic punishment. Why Speccy chooses to a few random lowlives when big-ticket killers like The Joker, Lex Luthor and Darkseid are allowed to live isn't explained. Left to his own devices The Spectre is a purposeless mass of scary green swirlyness (to use the technical term), so it needs a human soul to give it direction. That's where former homicide detective Crispus Allen comes in. He'll be familiar to readers of the brilliant, much missed, cancelled-before-it's-time series Gotham Confidental, in which Crispus died, freeing up his soul to be Spectricated.
The story itself is a whole lot of grime, cockroaches, blood, rats and blood that's been left out so long it's turned to grime. It's supposed to recall the old EC horror comics, but instead we get a reimagining of Se7en where we're supposed to root for John Doe. And he's an all-powerful vengence spirit detective ghost. I hate to be all comics-code but the gore is way too much for an all-ages comic- there's close ups of heads exploding, close ups of rotting corpses, a crime scene in which the inker had a epileptic fit while doing the red air-brushing, a giant green rat vomiting black oil that turns into rats which eat this guy. If the last one sounds retarded then that's because it is, but it's also UNEXPECTED! so the comic has fufilled its remit. It gets a C- out of ten.
The B-comic, Doctor Thirteen, is much more satisfying. Terry Thirteen is an inexplicably wealthy widower who has never had any job considered more 'real' than Paranormal Investigator and he's having sex dreams about his daughter. Writer Brian Azzerello spends the prologue telling us why prologues are sloppy writing, the next two pages in a dream sequence which would make David Lynch scratch his head, then takes us through a soft-focus erotic fantasy about the main character's daughter and then right on into the plot itself. Doc 13's old college buddy, the French Premier, wants him to investigate a plane crash in which the survivors ate each other and were themselves eaten by a Yeti-like creature.
Artist Cliff Chiang makes Thirteen and his daughter jump off the page. The panel of Thirteen approaching the Yeti to tell him off is more evocative than anything in the majority of comics put out today, and when one panel in a backup feature does more for me than whole comics you know the industry's in a rut. I've not read much of Azzarello's stuff apart from his short Batman run but based on Doctor Thirteen I'm going to check out more of his work. The good doctor himself is defiantly square, meticulously skeptical and yet believable. His interactions with his teenage daughter should be a mass of cliches but somehow they work. And then there's the incest thing. Although there's no indication that they've actually done anything, there's a tension there that suggests something that should be creepy and alienating but coming from a character as disarming as Doctor Thirteen it just works to add a dimension to what could be Skeptical Enquirer magazine rendered in comic format. There's a 'blink and you miss it' on page six where Thirteen almost describes their ancestral home as their incestral home. Which isn't a word. I've checked.
The ending, which I won't give away, is absolutely classic. I give Doctor Thirteen in 'Architecture and Morality' 83% of two thumbs up.
The main thrust of the comic is The Spectre, with a back-up story with skeptical paranormal investigator Doctor Thirteen, which is a shame since Doc's story blows away the A-feature with superior writing and artwork, but we'll get to that in a minute.
Recapping the history of The Spectre would make my eyes bleed, so here's all you need to know to get up to speed: The Spectre is God's spirit of Vengence, capital V very much intended. If you do something wrong, The Spectre dishes out an ironic punishment. Why Speccy chooses to a few random lowlives when big-ticket killers like The Joker, Lex Luthor and Darkseid are allowed to live isn't explained. Left to his own devices The Spectre is a purposeless mass of scary green swirlyness (to use the technical term), so it needs a human soul to give it direction. That's where former homicide detective Crispus Allen comes in. He'll be familiar to readers of the brilliant, much missed, cancelled-before-it's-time series Gotham Confidental, in which Crispus died, freeing up his soul to be Spectricated.
The story itself is a whole lot of grime, cockroaches, blood, rats and blood that's been left out so long it's turned to grime. It's supposed to recall the old EC horror comics, but instead we get a reimagining of Se7en where we're supposed to root for John Doe. And he's an all-powerful vengence spirit detective ghost. I hate to be all comics-code but the gore is way too much for an all-ages comic- there's close ups of heads exploding, close ups of rotting corpses, a crime scene in which the inker had a epileptic fit while doing the red air-brushing, a giant green rat vomiting black oil that turns into rats which eat this guy. If the last one sounds retarded then that's because it is, but it's also UNEXPECTED! so the comic has fufilled its remit. It gets a C- out of ten.
The B-comic, Doctor Thirteen, is much more satisfying. Terry Thirteen is an inexplicably wealthy widower who has never had any job considered more 'real' than Paranormal Investigator and he's having sex dreams about his daughter. Writer Brian Azzerello spends the prologue telling us why prologues are sloppy writing, the next two pages in a dream sequence which would make David Lynch scratch his head, then takes us through a soft-focus erotic fantasy about the main character's daughter and then right on into the plot itself. Doc 13's old college buddy, the French Premier, wants him to investigate a plane crash in which the survivors ate each other and were themselves eaten by a Yeti-like creature.
Artist Cliff Chiang makes Thirteen and his daughter jump off the page. The panel of Thirteen approaching the Yeti to tell him off is more evocative than anything in the majority of comics put out today, and when one panel in a backup feature does more for me than whole comics you know the industry's in a rut. I've not read much of Azzarello's stuff apart from his short Batman run but based on Doctor Thirteen I'm going to check out more of his work. The good doctor himself is defiantly square, meticulously skeptical and yet believable. His interactions with his teenage daughter should be a mass of cliches but somehow they work. And then there's the incest thing. Although there's no indication that they've actually done anything, there's a tension there that suggests something that should be creepy and alienating but coming from a character as disarming as Doctor Thirteen it just works to add a dimension to what could be Skeptical Enquirer magazine rendered in comic format. There's a 'blink and you miss it' on page six where Thirteen almost describes their ancestral home as their incestral home. Which isn't a word. I've checked.
The ending, which I won't give away, is absolutely classic. I give Doctor Thirteen in 'Architecture and Morality' 83% of two thumbs up.
posted by G at 3:19 PM
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