Can FBI agent Miranda Keller save the day, or will dark forces consume her and the rest of a sleepy little valley’s humanity? It’s curtains for Miskatonic, the riff on H.P. Lovecraft’s lore and personal lousiness by writer Mark Sable, artist Giorgio Pontrelli, colorist Pippa Bowland and letterer Dave Sharpe.
Harry’s on a train. The train’s not stopping. And neither will Harry in the sophomore issue of Maniac of New York by writer Elliott Kalan, artist and colorist Andrea Mutti and letterer Taylor Esposito.
Will Nevin: You know, Justin, I’ve always said when the dark lord closes a portal to an otherworldly dimension of pain and torment, he opens a portal to a gateway of torture and misery: My friend, we say goodbye to Miskatonic this week, but we’ve also got our next book scouted only a wee bit over the horizon.
Justin Partridge: Double your pleasure! Double yer BLOOD! We kind of lucked into this double-creature-feature format here, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t still just so fun. We put down the Necronomicon, only to then pick up the chase with a masked maniac. It’s a drive-in MIRACLE!
Miskatonic: The Dread Hour is Here
WN: I’m just a semi-literate idiot with two (maybe three?) advanced degrees, so I can’t pretend to know everything that happened in the climax of this series — to me, it seemed like it had both a truckload of exposition/tying up stray threads and the sort of action you’d want in a big finale. J-Part, can you (1) bring the people up to speed with what’s going on as we close out this book and (2) tell me what you liked about the finish here?
JP: Oh yeah, it’s certainly got … a lot of moving parts, let’s say. I will try to summarize as best I can.
As we left our “heroes” last issue, they are both at opposite ends of the cosmic horror spectrum. Tom and Professor Armitage are left in the wake of Asenath Waite’s attacks last issue, while Miranda Keller has walked directly into her arms, thinking she is the victim of her husband’s Chthonic indoctrination.
Both parties quickly learn that Waite and her spun webs of influence and magicks are not what they appear to be, and then we barrel pretty quickly into the finale set piece. Which seems to jam together the boat-based hijinks of The Call of Cthulhu’s finale and the explosive final button of the novella “At the Mountains of Madness.” Meaning Tom and Miranda ram a literal boatload of explosives into Waite’s Deep One-infested altar island and then blow it up.
It has a nice finality to it, as well as more fun “remixing” of the Lovecraft canon that this series has really excelled at. I will say, for the intricate mystery elements to then be largely knocked away in favor of a “bang” ending, it is also pretty in line with the Lovecraft prose style, for both good and ill. Good in that we get some more pep in the series, but also bad in that it seems a bit basic for a series that was more focused on mood and mystery up until now.
Obviously it’s not enough to really scuttle the series, but it might read a touch pedestrian once this gets collected fully.
WN: I’m assuming that this weird lil’ series is done, *but* let’s irresponsibly dream. Where would you like to see this book go if there was a second volume?
JP: I think it definitely leaves itself in a place that would allow for an easy follow-up.
I won’t totally spoil it here, but both Tom and Miranda are left in places where Sable could easily pick them back up in another volume, for sure. There is even a neat little folding into the real-time historical development of the FBI that could be interesting to support further in another series, so yeah, I would love to maybe get another one.
If I was “wishlisting” what I would want to see it covering, I would really like maybe a return to Lovecraft’s New York for Tom or an exploration of another seldom seen (and more racially diverse) setting like New Orleans or the like (which also pops up a few times in the Lovecraft canon). I would also really like it if Sable focused a bit more on Lovercaft’s fear of race and less-than-acceptable racial politics that bleed through into the stories. He got close to it here, and DID lob some pretty choice potshots at richies and the more “powerful” families of the Miskatonic Valley, but I would love to see that same attention paid to HPL’s terrible depiction of race.
Also the Mi-Go, please and thank you.
WN: I knew we would have different reads on this book, you with all of your Lovecraft knowledge and me with neither of those things. I have to mark it down as a disappointment since it never settled into a story that worked as both a meta critique of H.P. Racistcraft and as a rip roarin’ blast through the fish fuckin’ Guilded Age, but sir, the last word on Miskatonic is yours.
JP: I dug it, largely!
I think it’s a little stuffy and “inside baseball” in parts, but that’s more of a feature not a bug when it comes to cosmic horror/pulps. I also think we could stand to do with this sort of less precious “recontextualization” of the Lovecraft canon. We have gotten it a few times in prose (like in the work of Brian Lumley and others), but comics could do with a bit more of this kinda piss-taking and jazzing up of the Cthulhu Mythos, for sure.
Maniac: It’s a Massacre on the Day Your Fancy Train Begins Service
WN: After a breathtaking bow, Maniac of New York is back for its second issue, and while this one didn’t leave me breathless, it’s still a good fuckin’ book as it starts to incorporate more slasher and action motifs on top of its satire. Two points that really stood out to me: 1) the detached Bob Woodward-type author who can cover (and subsequently profit from) the political carnage and idiocy without having the moral courage to speak to the consequences and 2) the fact that the mayor now has a sudden interest in Harry because he’s doing his thing on one of the mayor’s pet projects, a fully automated subway train. (Which is a neat thing that’s a plot contrivance without feeling like a plot contrivance.)
JP: OH ABSOLUTELY!
And we talked a bit last time about how novel this book’s take on slashers was and how it was neatly folding that same take into the very infrastructure of New York. And now, issue #2 just starts to nail it down even harder!
I truly love the idea that a barely human killing machine *isn’t* being dealt with as such. He’s being thought of more in terms of how he will affect the mayor’s new bid for revelvency and how badly he will overshadow one of his personal projects. More than that, I am really loving the continued focus on the human elements of living in a city that comes with a fucking barely human killing machine.
Again, we got touches of it in the debut, which baited the hook really well. But here in issue #2, as we bounce back and forth from the people caught on this train with Harry to the impotent civil servants that now have to deal with the people caught on the train with Harry, we finally get a terrifyingly, achingly human face to the killing (which then further fuels the fire of our two leads). I feel like in another book or even in a movie, this might feel too gimmicky or maybe even a touch cloying once we see who exactly is surviving Harry’s latest rampage.
But honestly, I was just still SO taken by it that I didn’t even try to poke a lot of holes in it. I just … really like smart slasher setups, y’all. Especially when they take everything into account like this series seems to be.
WN: What are you hoping for as we get deeper into this series?
JP: OH MAN, so much.
Honestly I would LOVE a little more backstory in and around Harry. I don’t think we need a full-on origin story or anything, but I would love to know a bit more about the “man” in “maniac,” for sure. I would also LOVE some more context for our leading ladies, too. We get a bit more pushes in that direction in #2 as they have a real human moment between them before making the choice to pursue Harry, but I think we have only scratched the surface there.
WN: I think I like Harry more as a mystery — seems like as soon as we start answering questions or filling in details about him, we’d be staring at the midichlorians of the Maniac universe and wishing we hadn’t. I’ll say that I’m at least open to giving him more of a story, because right now, he’s Unlicensed Jason Voorhees and not much more. But maybe he doesn’t need to be much: It’s the inhumanity of everyone else around him that makes Maniac such a great book.
Bunny Mask: It’s What We’re Hopping to Next
WN: Finally, let’s talk about what we’re getting into this summer: Bunny Mask, the next B-movie(ish) AfterShock book from writer Paul Tobin and the current creative team on Maniac (artist Andrea Mutti and letterer Taylor Esposito). I read the release announcement, and while I still don’t know for sure what we’re in for, Tobin says, “[a]nything that treads that line between horror and the somewhat sensual, it’s probably been a spark for this series.” What are you looking to get from this when it launches in June?
JP: OOOOOOhohohoh, this thing looks so up my alley it’s sickening.
I think beyond Tobin’s name (a name I feel we kind of undervalue in terms of what he’s brought consistently to horror comics throughout his career), I think Bunny Mask just looks COOL and interesting.
Also hearing that “line between horror and sensuality” REALLY starts ringing “Giallo” bells in my head. Suspiria. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Black Sunday. All terrifying, of course, but also all vaguely hot in their own special ways. Giallos are a subgenre that are really underrepresented, especially in American comics, so any book that can even get *close* to that kinda energy, I am there for.
Also, plus, it’s just like … a hot monster lady in a bunny mask. Whattaya want, A ROAD MAP?
WN: Justin, don’t make me get the hose.
Short Shocks
- Harry’s huffing vocalizations are getting really creepy now
- Justin was going to do an infographic about the Miskatonic finale as there is a real “who’s who” of Lovecraft monsters in the final splash, but he forgot. Please forgive him.
- He’s forgiven.
- Also he would LOVE to see The Great Race of Yith pop up in the next volume of Miskatonic, but worries that Fred Van Lente’s Weird Detective might have already cornered that Yithian market too well.
- We should also maybe get some Fungi from Yoggoth, but really Justin just wanted to type “Fungi from Yoggoth” as it is immensely fun to type “Fungi from Yoggoth.”
Justin Partridge has loved comics all his life. He hasn't quite gotten them to love him back just yet. But that hasn't stopped him from trying as he has been writing about them now for a little over a decade. With bylines at Newsarama, Shelfdust, PanelXPanel, and more, Justin has been doing the work and putting in the time! Comics have yet to return his calls. Usually he can be found on Twitter screaming about Doctor Who.
Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.
