If the dead rise in Arkham and no one is alive to scream, are they still scary? It’s time for Miskatonic #3 as written by Mark Sable, penciled by Giorgio Pontrelli, colored by Pippa Bowland and lettered by Thomas Mauer.
Will Nevin: So. We have news.
Justin Partridge: Such WONDROUS news, Little Monsters! Just as wondrous as that big vampire lady from the new Resident Evil game!
WN: I have no idea what the children are talking about with that game, but I take it she’s real, real big.
Even though Miskatonic is going to conclude in a few months, you’re not getting rid of us. In fact, you’re going to see more of us as our tentacles ensconce you into a warm, otherworldly cocoon from which there is no escape, only eternal darkness and damnation (this Lovecraft stuff is fun) because we’re picking up next month’s Maniac of New York — which, interestingly enough was previewed in this week’s Miskatonic — and keeping with it and other AfterShock books that have … well, this certain flavor to them. Justin, why are we doing this?
JP: WELL, WILL, we are doing this, 1. Because we enjoy each other and want to keep this going as long as humanly possible. But 2 (and more specifically) we want to be the “grindhouse” section of CXF. Meaning we wanna write about the sleaze, the bloody, the slightly pulpier side of comics that you don’t normally get much focus on! Miskatonic was kind of a happy accident, both piquing Will’s interest and roping me back into the cosmic horror junk that I so love and care for, but all the books we cover from here on out could have absolutely been right at home as chunky VHS tapes screaming at you from the video store windows. THAT is the sort of energy we are playing at here now, people.
Will might have the Bat-market cornered and I might be capriciously obsessed with the Imperium of Man, Sad Ginger Catholics and goop, but we BOTH love us some B-movie flavors and tones, and we thought that would be fun to work through here and with you lovely little creeps.
WN: If we still had column names (which I don’t think we do), I would have called this “Tremors: AfterShock’s B-Movie Books.” Do you like that? See the layers I’m working with there?
JP: My pitch was Monster(Comics)Vision, but that’s a bit wordy. Having modeled most of my life and work on Joe Bob Briggs, that should tell you a bunch about where my head is at about all this.
WN: Awww, shit. Briggs is the best. Of course, we ain’t done with Miskatonic yet, but let’s take it up and maybe even chat up our expectations for Maniac of New York. Sound good?
JP: SO GOOD! And we even get one of my FAVORITE Lovecraft anti-heroes here in issue #3! It’s a Yog-Sothoth’s Day Miracle!
WN: What do you get a friend for Yog-Sothoth’s Day? I feel so embarrassed.
Again with the Lore
WN: Gonna hit you with another lightning round of “Give Will the Lovecraftian context he needs to fully understand this book he started to read for reasons he doesn’t quite understand.” Up first: Asenath Waite (as someone other than a lesbian love interest and the ol’ Law & Order “no way she did it” diversionary suspect).
JP: Waite is really interesting in that she’s one of the only major female characters in HPL’s canon.
I was wondering if it actually WAS her last issue and not just a canny misdirect, but Sable did me the solid and went ahead and explicized it here. Introduced in “The Thing on the Doorstep,” Waite was brought up in the shadow of “Lovecraft country.” Born unto an unnamed and constantly veiled mother in Innsmouth, Waite displayed an aptitude for constant weirdness early, scaring even the children of Innsmouth and rising to be a pretty prominent sorceress.
Catching the eye of Edward Pickman Derby (who we will get to in a second), she, of course, started mucking about with forces she didn’t understand and became imbued with chaos magicks, causing her to look impossibly old even at relatively young ages. I won’t spoil how this all turns out for her, as I suspect Sable is going to do his own version of it in the coming issues, but just trust it doesn’t turn out well and gets rather … bodysnatchy.
WN: What’s the first thing they tell you in magick school? Don’t muck around with shit. Up next: the Pickman family.
JP: They of the titular model!
First spoken of in 1927’s “Pickman’s Model,” the Pickman family is a working artist’s nightmare. Obsessed with cracking through Old One Magicks with the use of artwork across all mediums, the Pickman family commissions artists to deliver impossible-sounding specifications in order to touch the grand darkness of the Old Ones beyond the veil of time.
Like the Whatley family, another twisted branch of the Arkham Valley’s gnarled family trees, the Pickmans are obsessed with squid monsters in their blood, having been tainted by madness early in their line and then casting that madness downward into their lines (like the poor, doomed Edward Pickman Derby, unfortunately betrothed to Waite and dragged further into Cthulhuian nonsense after mostly escaping his family).
WN: Dr. Halsey.
JP: Dr. Halsey is the head of the medical college attached to Miskatonic University and habitual thorn in the side of Herbert West, Re-Animator (elevated here in #3 to co-star as our leads continue to track down clues as to how all these HPL characters connect to the rash of bombings that kicked off the series).
Acting as somewhat of the antagonist of the title (though I would NOT go so far as to call Herby a “hero” at all, even despite his service in World War I), Halsey on paper is mainly just a stodgy square, stymying Herbert’s research in classes and eventually discovering his ghoulish attempts to reanimate (which gets him a shovel to the brain for the trouble and then a botched resurrection at the hands of West, who then drops him at a local sanitarium where he sits like a living Chekhov’s Gun until the final chapter, which is arguably the best thing Howie ever wrote).
Just to touch a bit back on our MonsterVision roots, Dean Halsey in the film series gets an affecting and oddly sweet incarnation thanks to actor Robert Sampson and his connection to the Queen Barbara Crampton, who plays his daughter Megan in the film.
WN: The various “foreign-sounding” names who were rounded up *and* why noted racist and anti-Semite (right?) Lovecraft included them in his work.
JP: HA! While that isn’t a totally unfair read, these actually are a bunch of fun cameos and shoutouts to another famous Lovecraft story in one fell swoop.
Mrs. Dombrowsky is the landlady of the setting of “Dreams in the Witch-House,” itself shown here as the Manson Boarding House in Arkham. Mazurewicz and Father Iwanicki as well are co-stars of that story, which finds a local Miskatonic math student plagued by insane dreams connected to the “unearthly geometry” he is studying.
(Will’s note: I remember that geometry scene in the last issue. I’m learning!)
The house, obviously, was once owned by a witch (heavily ethnically coded like the rest of the characters who now tend her former property) and is trying to break through reality and snap up the soul of one Walter Gillman. Though kudos to Sable for once again making the text of his read on Lovecraft fully focused on how stunted and backward even his most unassuming use of ethnic characters is. Here as soon as they are introduced, they are then shuffled out of frame with a pointed crack that their “papers needed to be in order.” He knows what he’s doing, that Mark Sable.
WN: Did I miss anything else that probably went over my head?
JP: Honestly, I don’t think so! Except about ol’ Herbie West, but we are about to get ALLLL into him in a second.
Oh Shit, It’s Zombies
WN: I think as an issue to sit down and read and enjoy, this was my favorite to date: straightforward action that ends with some hungry zombies. Two questions: What did you think overall here, and how central are the undead to Lovercraft’s works?
JP: Weirdly enough, not really that central! Aside from one major exception.
But tackling the first part of your question second, I DID really enjoy this. I really love that, while Sable is largely tracking his own threads here, weaving around a story of historical influence and pulp sensibilities, he is also making sure to tie in heavy tracks of established Lovecraft lore into his own historically accurate pulp. Stuff like that usually really gets me and shows a level of research that Sable has clearly put into the work.
But beyond that, he is bringing up one of HPL’s most famous characters: Herbert West, Re-Animator! Even if someone has never read a Lovecraft story, odds are they will still know Herbert West. First introduced in the story bearing his name in 1921-22 (as it was one of Howie’s most serialized works), Herbert as a character is one of the only human Lovecraft protagonists who has gained a second life beyond the page.
(Will’s note: I did not know Herbert West, and I will not hold this against Justin.)
Not only did he get a stellar movie version at the hands of Stuart Gordon and actor Jeffery Combs (who has portrayed West for several decades now across at least four Re-Animator sequels), but West has gone on to star in various other comic runs from Dynamite Entertainment, several TTRPGs modules from Modiphius Entertainment and Chaosium, INC and various other Lovecraft-flavored writings in either cameos or quick guest-starring roles.
Here, we see him acting largely as an antagonist as his resurrection experiements have been somewhat curtailed thanks to the rash of bombings and FBI investigations in the Arkham Valley, but Sable still gives us a pretty pragmatic and oddly confident version of West, going even so far as to keep his weird, final fate in the story largely intact (killed by a fellow soldier from Flanders Field who West revived sans head, causing him to literally CARRY his head around in a box while the body operates like a poorly made skin marionette).
Basically, this is just a long way for me to say, I am happy to see Herbert and his shambling experiments playing into the endgame of the series and doubly so knowing Sable also knows this is a big deal.
Like Jason Takes Manhattan, But Boring
WN: The first thing that attracted me to Maniac of New York was the premise: the idea that a real-life version of a movie monster could be so ubiquitous, so commonplace that he seems to be mundane. Then I saw the art, and those watercolors sealed the damn deal. My man, what are you looking forward to with the book, and what do you see as maybe some challenges the creative team is going to have to work out?
JP: I do love me a slasher premise.
And like you said, the preview pages we get in the back of Miskatonic #3 (provided as one of the many wonderful things AfterShock Comics provides to the value of their single-issue products) are quite striking. The slasher genre is one I think gets largely overlooked in terms of the elements of style they have brought to the table of horror, both on screen and in comic pages. People talk a bunch about EC Comics, but there’s a lot less talk about the effects movies like Bill Lustig’s Maniac (which the art team is also pulling heavily from here, making New York an oppressive side character in the background sets of panels) and The New York Ripper, which showed off the New Hollywood take on NYC that was developed further (arguably building ON horror’s claimed real estate) in stuff like Taxi Driver and Bad Lieutenant.
But even beyond the obvious style, anchored by the striking mask design of our Jason Voorhees-like antihero at the center of the title, I think this subgenre of horror is weirdly underexplored in comics. We’ve seen kinda novel takes on this in books like Nick Spencer’s Bedlam and Tim Seeley’s Hack/Slash, but even those come at the “slasher archetype” in such a way that is focused through the lens of superhero comics and the villain/hero/civilian dynamic triptych.
Obviously, we will need to poke at it a bit beyond the preview pages, but I am genuinely curious to see what more this new title has in store for us. The same curiosity bubbles in my brain toward the finale of Miskatonic and the other titles we could potentially cover ahead!
I just … love horror, you guys, and I am happy I get a chance to talk about it here.
WN: Justin has…the madness.
Mi-Go Mailbag
- Might have to change this to the Maniac Mailbag for the next column.
- Some more examples of books in this same vein: basically anything Lonnie Nadler and Alex de Campi have ever written, Fearscape, maybe that new Image anthology with Chip? I would say Ice Cream Man, but we’ve already got that covered here.
- Maniac is streaming on Shudder right now. Also, you should get Shudder. It rules.
Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.
