It’s the end for Harry and the brave, hopeless people trying to stop him. Or is it? Let’s carve into Maniac of New York #5 by writer Elliott Kalan, artist Andrea Mutti, letterer Taylor Esposito and publisher AfterShock.
What’s a few chisel-chipped teeth, psychosis and forced labor between friends? Let’s find out in Bunny Mask #1 by writer Paul Tobin, artist Mutti, letterer Esposito and AfterShock.
Will Nevin: Justin, I want you to imagine a dark world adjacent to our own — but one without joy or light. A place where Donald Trump got reelected. Where all of your favorite sports teams won’t stop tripping over their own johnsons just as they’re about to win a game. When it rains, it smells like stale beer and chunky vomit, and it rains constantly. Disney’s put all of Star Wars into the ol’ Vault — save Rise of Skywalker. I’m saying that things is fucked, my dude, if you didn’t get where I was going. The cherry on this shit sundae? Maniac of New York #5 was actually the last issue in the series.
Justin Partridge: OH ZOUNDS, I can hardly imagine! But we horror-hounds know better than that, don’t we? That you can’t keep a good slasher like Harry down for long. Even if you do manage to “kill” him, push him in front of a train or maneuver him into a wood chipper, big bois like Harry don’t stay gone forever.
Will: Admittedly, not much would be as bad as another four years of Donald Trump or Trump Jr. or Ivanka or (maybe I should stop there before I give myself an angry sad). But, man, how wretched it would have been to end the series on what’s kind of a flat cliffhanger. To be clear, I’m not mad — I love where we’re leaving it. But this is not a “Best of Both Worlds, pt. 1” sort of deal here. I wouldn’t even say it rises to Widening Gyre levels of tension. It’s a teaser. And that’s fine — so long as we’re not in the Trump dark place, and we get the second volume.
Justin: OH TOTALLY. And like we somewhat discussed in the last column, the slasher subgenre is positively RIDDLED with stuff like this. Limp feints meant to obfuscate just where that hulking “dead” body went to or obvious red herrings setting up one last BOO to send us out into the lobby, giggling and covered in popcorn butter.
Do I think the slightly shuffled ending of Maniac of New York #5 saps some of the delicious tension it’s fostered? Sure. But does that make me any less excited for the prospect of a Maniac of New York 2: Maniac Harder? It abso-fuckin-lutely does NOT. I cannot wait to get into it.
Will: Let’s frame this up clearly before we get any deeper: Maniac of New York ends (spoiler) with an announcement that the series is continuing next year with “The Bronx is Burning,” a second volume that will surely see Harry tear ass all over the city and maybe one borough in particular. Pardner, what did you think of dropping the news like this?
Justin: IT’S SO GRINDHOUSE, RIGHT?! I know video stores have gone the way of the dodo, but there was always a delicious charge when you would walk into one and go, “They made THREE more House movies?!” This announcement at the end of the issue was the perfect aperitif to the story’s cliffhanger — which finds Harry having survived the “Death Train” and lumbering toward a crowded Bronx street — and gave me that same weird charge. I feel like the overall response to the book has been positive. Hopefully, bolstered by our gory exaltations here, but I would have assumed a second volume was probably in the cards all along.
The way we leave the principle cast as well as the significant time jump we have in this finale speaks to a larger game in place. Basically, this is all just a long way to say, yes, I truly appreciate the Sean S. Cunningham hustle put into this burgeoning franchise. We’ve now been introduced to Harry properly, with this arc, why NOT start thinking of what else you can do with him?
Will: We’re not privy to AfterShock’s internal debates (although we should be, damnit — call us, Mike!), but you have to think the second volume got the green light fairly early in the run — I don’t know how you write #4 the way it was written without knowing you’ve got the runway to land the story in another mini or two. Before we move on to the merits, let me hit you with this hypo: What if this first series was capped at four issues, and we came back in October with a meatier special that bridged both the time gap and the substantive story matter between the two series? That seems more of a freewheeling/Image approach, but I think that could have really worked here.
Justin: I definitely feel like that would have probably worked better than this fifth issue.
Not to say that I just HATED this issue; far from it! I think it’s a ballsy finale to end the series this low key. Not to mention the slightly shuffled nature of the scene layouts ALONGSIDE the time jump!
BUT, all that said and like I alluded to earlier, I think the choice to focus on this more showy, jittering scene vignette loses some of the amazing tension this series has brewed in its opening issues. I think it might lose some people who were invested in the “resolution” of the train set piece. This could just be the Fangoria Person in me, too, but I think losing that real red spreading moment for them on the train, you feel like there is a lack of real payoff here.
I think the stuff Kalan REPLACES it with is interesting, for sure. The focus on the banal evil of bureaucracy and how our leads have all settled post-Death Train. That stuff really supports this final issue. But again, I just would have maybe liked something a bit more straightforward to send us out sated for the second volume.
Maniac: As One Nightmare Ends, Another Begins
Will: One of the normies out there is going to read this and think I hated Maniac #5, so let me say now that’s not true. The pacing — and this goes back to our observations on the last issue — is weird, and I wasn’t expecting this to be just a setup for the next volume, but on the whole, I dug where we landed — especially in how this launches “Bronx is Burning.” I do hate that I have to wait the better part of a whole-ass year, though.
Justin: NO ABSOLUTELY AGREE! I ALSO feel like I might be coming across too harsh, or like I wasn’t genuinely struck by the choices #5 makes. I totally was! I just wish … maybe again, something just as small as giving us a more conventional order of the scenes. Or maybe even a bit more time to “live” in the time jump after a full, frontloaded horror-focused opening.
I dunno. I just can’t quite put my finger on it. This is a real Halloween III: Season of the Witch situation! Like, I LOVE that movie. But it’s a terrible “third Halloween movie,” for sure. It’s like I like this issue a lot, but I don’t really feel like it’s a true “ending” though either.
Will: As to the actual story beats, I didn’t find much here — again, it’s a coda/teaser, so that’s what you’d expect. However, in terms of clues about the main themes of the next volume, it seems like we’re moving beyond Harry as a proxy for gun violence and bringing in right-wing media blowhards and grifters and the brains they’ve poisoned. And goddamn if that isn’t a great idea. Kalan looks to be on a Mark Russell-level track for comic book satire.
Justin: Coda is actually a WONDERFUL word for it.
And yeah, part of the frustrating thing, at least for me, is that I just WANT THAT SECOND VOLUME. RIGHT BLOODY NOW. Kalan seems to be really dialed in on what Harry means to the book and how he is meant to be wielded in this world, and I just need that hooked into my veins immediately. The idea that he’s become the right’s new boogeyman AND strawman with which to cudgel their viewership is truly, madly, deeply wonderful. I just want Harry books forever.
Do I have a new favorite slasher now? Has Pamela Voorhees’ baby boy been supplanted?!
Bunny Mask: The Hell?
Will: Continuing our double feature, we’ve got our *third* No. 1 on the table with Bunny Mask, and buddy boy, I think my prevailing thought after reading was that it’s fucking weird. Can’t rightly call it good or bad yet, but I can say I’m ready for someone to tackle a Misery-style story of captivity and obsession in a comic (which Bunny Mask is not as a whole, but it was something like that for a couple of pages and it clearly got me thinking about what could have been). What were your takeaways in reading this first issue, and — if you were out there amongst the rabble and not writing about the series with your best bud Will — would you continue reading?
Justin: OH HELL YEAH. I definitely think I would.
Mainly because I am a big fan of Tobin. His Marvel Adventures run meant a great deal to me as a younger reader, but his Prometheus contribution to the Fire & Stone crossover and creator-owned series Colder got me to really pay attention to his horror sensibilities.
And this thing here is just … fully fucking gonzo, and I really dug it. When we teased its coverage here, I mistakenly thought it might be some kind of Italian Giallo-esque setup. Like a hot theme-obsessed lady in an impractical nonsense costume murdering gross dudes in beautiful ways. You know, that old chestnut.
But Bunny Mask #1 revealed something much more complex and far, far darker than I was expecting. I mean, let’s try and take a stab at the basic setup here. We have a troubled man and his foster daughter. The father speaks of a “Snitch” hidden inside a nearby mountain, which he has become obsessed with tunnelling through and finding. Oh, also, he’s chipped his daughter’s teeth into points and kidnapped people to make them join her in the mining.
AND THAT’S NOT EVEN THE WEIRDEST PART.
From there, we follow the father’s latest victim, a rough-and-tumble social worker and Bee’s work in the mines. Which finally reveals something akin to the father’s ramblings in the form of a massive cave system that serves as the home for the titular Bunny Mask.
A lot of the issue’s opening pages are devoted to this, laying out this shockingly well-mannered nightmare scenario only to upend it in the opening’s back half as a possible dream. Like Will said, fucking weird, but I am still weirdly into it. If only just to try and get to the bottom of all of this.
The dozen or so variant covers of the tremendous Bunny Mask design don’t exactly hurt either.
Will: A little Misery, a little Invasion of the Body Snatchers and, as we can’t say enough, plenty of fucking weird shit. More on this story, Loyal Content Consumers, as it develops.
A Fundamental Misconception
Will: Boss Man Dan knows how I like to drop surprises as bits, so here’s one for you: What would you think about picking Parasomnia as our next series? As a Dark Horse book,it’s breaking the one flippin’ rule we talked about for this (chatting up AfterShock B-movie variety books), but it’s more Andrea Mutti, so at least we have some continuity there. I think it could work.
Justin: BROTHER, you had me as “Cullen Bunn.” I truly love the entire second career Bunn has now had as basically comics’ Stephen King. People always thought it was gonna be Scotty Snyder, and there is still time for it to maybe happen, but Make Mine Bunn for sure.
Plus I also feel, similarly to AfterShock, Dark Horse Comics has always been a genre-focused publisher, so I am calling the play good! BOOK IT, BOSS MAN DAN. Let’s talk some more horror.
[Grote’s note: … Sure.]
Will: We’ll put that Bunn in the oven.
[Grote’s note: But no more Bunn puns.]
Short Shocks
- Gina’s name being misspelled on her office door seems exceptionally fitting for the care given to her position in the mayor’s administration.
- Harry being able to vocalize more complex things like names was a nice touch for his depiction in a nightmare.
- I’m (Will) shocked Justin didn’t bite on the Widening Gyre joke. Alas.
- YET ANOTHER mention too of this fabled “Harry Free Zone” at work in NYC. Really hoping that comes back into play in Volume 2.
- Also Justin would have absolutely had at least four of those Bunny Mask variants on his wall if this book had come out in 2005.
Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.
