Dark Corners
Written & Illustrated by Caitlin Plovnick, Jeff Lok, Mario Van Buren and Denis St. John, with Steve Bissette and John Nicoll
Published by I Know Joe Kimpel

The crew at I Know Joe Kimpel has been pushing out their four-square anthology books for a while now, and I’ve enjoyed every one of them. Minicomics aren’t exactly my forte, because I just don’t have the time to pursue them like I should (and because many I’ve sampled have been amateur in too many respects), but I’ve reached the point where I’m honestly looking forward to their latest anthology offering.

The most recent, Dark Corners, marks the group’s first major foray into horror comics, and the first of their four-square books wrapped around a single theme. Of course, not being a horror fan, per se, I came to the book with a little trepidation.

Well, the Joe Kimpel crew hasn’t completely turned me around on horror, but they’ve at least acquitted themselves professionally. Caitlin Plovnik’s strip deals with an imaginary friend and a twist ending that I’m not sure how to read. One reading doesn’t work for me at all, but the other kind of does. The story’s a little under-drawn, but not to the point that it’s distracting. Solid piece, if I’m reading the ending correctly.

Mario Van Buren follows with the second installment of “Jenny, the Marsh.” Of course, I haven’t read part one, so take anything I say with a grain of salt. Mario’s strip is the best drawn strip in the book, employing an open, bigfoot style for the characters. However, Van Buren layers on the shadows to amp up the atmosphere for Jenny’s cornfield encounter, and the dreamy, reality-challenged nature of the vision adds a haunting element.

“Of the Matters that Occurred on the Road to Carlyle County,” by Jeff Lok, is a peculiar beast. The art is cartoony, with large areas of cross-hatching to add depth and shadow, and the character designs are great, totally adorable and a nice contrast to the story’s dark tone. That said, the story meanders too much, using five panels where two would suffice. Rather than building the moment, I found myself struggling to keep my attention on the pages.

The final piece, Dennis St. John’s, is the most traditionally horror-oriented. Losing teeth, fangs, vomit, creepy sexual encounters, etc., not really my thing, but I can see where others might find it creepier than I do. The art’s pretty solid, a little loose and sloppy, but much better than most other minicomics.

Steve Bissette, the Swamp Thing and Tyrant dude, provides interior illustrations between each of the stories, and those are really cool.

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How Seth writes: Geoff Pevere interviews the George Sprott author about his writing process for The Star.

Your anniversary-inspired Asterix overview of the day: Ben East writes about “good old Asterix and his fulsome friend Obelix” in this column for The National.

Basketball guy married to famous-for-being-famous lady didn’t work too hard on his Batman costume: I still like it better than the ones Christian Bale and the other movie Batmen have worn though

“Millar to direct superhero movie”: I hope it’s better received than Frank Miller’s was…

The single scariest image the comics blogosphere came up with this Haloween weekend: Mike Sterling had it.

I had read all 44 pages of FVZA: Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency #1 (Radical Comics) before I began to understand why the comic book existed at all and why it felt like a very solid premise from which a story was being reverse engineered, rather than a story that needed to be told.

That realization didn’t come from the comic book itself sadly, but from an interview with writer David Hine, printed after this first third of the story ends—he was apparently brought in to turn the website fvza.org into a comic book. (This also explains the wonky credits. David Hine and Roy Allan Martinez are the only creators with their names on the cover; on the title page the former is credited as “writer” and the latter as “illustrator,” but there are also two people given a “conceived by” credit and two more people given a “painted by” credit).

The premise is an alternate history of the United States, in which both vampires and zombies are real, and have posed existential threats to the nation since at least the time of the Civil War. Eventually, a federal organization was formed to protect the country from these two supernatural menaces. At present, they’ve both been seemingly stamped out, and the agency is in decline, the way that perhaps the Department of Homeland Security would be if the threat of terrorism were somehow almost completely erased.

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So there will be comics in 2010, which means that the comics industry has officially lasted about forty years longer than expected. Lucas has party favors. Here’s a look at some of the comics that will kick off the end of the century’s first decade, courtesy of Diamond’s Previews catalog.

Ever since it was announced that BOOM! obtained the Disney license, I’ve been hoping for some Carl Barks-centric trade paperbacks. Well, I kind of got what I wanted. Donald Duck Classics vol. 1: Quack Up is credited to Barks, and certainly will merit a flip-through. But let me clarify: I’m hoping for 100% Barks-created Uncle Scrooge collections!

I’ve been digging on Jason’s comics a lot lately, as anybody who reads my “It Came From the NYPL” series should know. Almost Silent is nearly 300 pages, in hardcover, of Jason’s superb comics, compiling four classics (none of which I’ve read yet) into one convenient volume. More pages, better price, I’m going to finally buy a Jason comic!

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