TKO Presents: Tales of Terror Is A Trick Or Treat Bag Of Halloween Horror

Forrest Hollingsworth: Rob, we’re gathered here today to celebrate the lives and numerous deaths in TKO’s newest horror anthology, TKO Presents: Tales of Terror, which collects all of their previously released horror shorts. 

First, though, I want to know how you feel about framing narratives for anthologies. There’s a storied history for them in horror, going back at least to the early days of Tales From The Crypt and staying true to form as recently as the celebrated V/H/S94. I understand the idea in theory, introducing a narrative or thematic thread that will tie everything together, but sometimes it seems like more effort than it’s worth — too much posturing before the content. What do you think?

Robert Secundus: I’ve been thinking about this alot in the wake of discussion of V/H/S 94. I think where I’m at right now is I really love the idea too, but too often it’s bogged down by the weird need to explain the anthology. Instead of some justification for shorts, I’d like something that sets the mood; something that gives thematic rather than narrative context. Better to not have it than to have a bad one. 

Forrest: Well bud, regardless of our feelings about them, I just looked around the Google Doc and…we’re in one right now. I’m thinking, and roll with me on this, that we’re two comic book reviewers for a site called “ComicsXF” (We can workshop this, maybe riff on a recognizable X-Men name or something?) and we’re going to offer a quick paragraph or two about these stories. A real “thumbs guy” from Gladiator situation. 

You in?

Rob: I am! That sounds good for the segments, but how do we feel about theme? Maybe we’re comedic horror host reviewers. 

Forrest: Oooh, let’s be the world’s first true crime comics reviewers and podcasters. We’ll review books on the downtime between the good stuff. The world is looking for this niche! The market demands it! SEO!

Rob: Or maybe we’re in a grim and gritty world, or maybe— oh no! I’m too late! The segments are beginning! There’s no ti–

Seeds of Eden

Written by Liana Kangas and Joe Corallo, art by Paul Azaceta, letters by Jeff Powell

Rob: This was an extremely compelling opening in that it’s very unexpected; Azaceta’s vibrant colors, his beautiful scenes are not typical horror-anthology fare, I think, nor are far future social commentary/ scifi horror. 

Forrest: Thank God the Biden Administration is announcing an AI bill of rights so this never happens…right? Anyways, I’m a little less impressed with this one. Narratively, the utopian idealism becoming dystopian reality is a compelling hook, but I don’t find much of a connection to any of the characters, living or dead and so any worthwhile commentary just becomes too abstracted to matter. Azaceta brings a nice 2001-reminiscent flair to the visuals, and the sprinklers raining blood is a fantastic set piece, but I was looking for something more. 

The Father of All Things

Written by Sebastian Girner, art by Baldemar Rivas, letters by Steve Wands

Forrest: There’s something…sinister about this one. The muted beige and blues giving away to that fiery red, the long stretches of the trenches already dug in just the first year of WWI, the weariness under the eyes of the protagonist. Girner and Rivas do a lot of storytelling in a short time with an exacting, but not overbearing precision. The labyrinthine trenches become a metaphor for the impossible shape and extent of the war efforts, the sight of trauma becomes an eye gouging affair, the final panel with so much of the graveyard just a haunting exercise in negative space. Sure, it’s a “war is Hell” story, but it’s a honed one.  And, oh, how I love a good title drop.

Rob: I also just have a fondness for World War I fiction and World War I horror. David Jones is one of my favorite poets, and what his work always does is invest his war experiences with cosmic levels of importance. I think you can’t understand modernity, and you can’t understand our current situation, without understanding The Great War. And I think cthonic horror is always a great avenue into that understanding. 

Night Train

Written by Steve Foxe, art by Lisandro Estherren, colors by Patricio Delpeche, letters by Steve Wands

Rob: This was my favorite of the collection, in large part because I think it’s the one story above all the others that could only work— or works best— in this medium in this format, a comic short story. It’s beautiful, surreal; it feels like a dream, and one that can’t be extended. It leaves us wondering after the night train, imagining what it might be, but if we had been given another single panel, if we had been given even a glimpse of explanation or extension, I think it would end the dream, wake us up.There’s something here that’s really natural too, or archetypal, though I never would have thought of it, the train as a dreamlike or surreal thing, the whistle in the distance in the dark.

Forrest: I would push back on that and say this kind of illogical series of events, a subtle swaying of things over time, has worked very well in stuff like Hereditary, but I ultimately agree that the execution here is something special. Foxe, in tandem with his frequent coworker, James Tynion IV’s work on Department of Truth, has a way of making things seem impossibly, incomprehensibly large, as if our protagonist’s role is just one small piece of a much bigger image. The time and narrative jumps lend themselves to that feeling of helplessness in a concise way, and the suggestion that the train is functioning exactly how it’s supposed to, on rails, is terrifying. Estherren and Delpeche do a good job of underlining that dreamlike state, the fuzziness around the edges of the skyline like the bit of spray paint left on a stencil — a hole punched out of things. I wouldn’t ever want to see a follow up to this, but I liked it.

Roofstompers

Written by Alex Paknadel, art by Ian MacEwan, letters by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

Forrest: This is one of the most immediately striking of the stories here, but it’s also too difficult to parse. MacEwan, one of my favorite artists working today, impresses a degree of feverishness with the densely detailed chicken scratch shading, the impossible structure of the cabin, and the tremendously varied panel design — I love the two page interplay where the exterior goes from a natural, muted green and blue to the surreal, bright rainbow, those bright colors still imparting a sense of “wrongness.” Unfortunately, Otsmane-Elhaou takes the influence too far and the lettering is, to my eyes, almost inaccessible. Paknadel’s story is fine, I kind of admire it’s reminiscence to cult classic horror movie Skeleton Key, actually, but it’s a little too underwhelming and confusing to warrant how hard you have to work to read it.

Rob: I honestly thought there might be something wrong with our review copy file; I really enjoy Ostmane-Elhaou’s experiments with lettering normally, but this time, even though I’m really fond of the idea, I agree it does make more difficult an already opaque story. The individual elements of this story I really enjoy, at least in the abstract. I think if it had the space to breathe— not even to explain things, just to give us more time to sit with this very complex narrative— it would be a delight. Of all the stories in this collection, this was by far the one I most wanted to see attempted in the standard TKO book format. 

River of Sin

Writing and art by Kelly Williams, letters by Chas! Pangburn

Forrest: Williams’ knack for grounding fable in grim realism really works for me.The monochromatic imagery in the opening segments, exaggerated fantasy, giving way to the more natural colors of the setting and the cast and then back again to the stark black and orange in the final moments feels contained, intentional, and narratively and visually resonant. It’s a simple story, but the characterization is groan inducingly spot on, and leaving on a note of appropriate retribution really serves as a good “palate cleanser” of a kind given the company of the other stories here.

Rob: That opening shot of the vulture had immense EC horror vibes to me, and the morality play that followed felt like something you’d see in any of the old-school horror tv or comic anthologies. 

Dame From The Dark

Written by Rob Pilkington, art by Kit Mills, letters by Ariana Maher

Rob: Of all the stories in this collection, this one feels the least like one designed as a short; it feels like a pilot, setting up not just one mystery and one conflict for our odd detectives to solve in these pages, but what feels like a seasonal or series-long arc. Mind you, it seems like a pilot to a series I’d enjoy— but while reading I couldn’t help but keep thinking of the story as a pitch.

Forrest: I have to agree. We talked about the framing narrative above, and this almost feels like one? The “TKO Studios Presents a Dame from the Dark Tale” thing included would work better as a means to introduce the other stories and mysteries here, but as a stand alone thing I can’t say I found it too compelling — does ACAB include weird spiritual buddy cop stories? The dramatic distance between the sillier art and the intensely scary bits (I was not expecting that hard turn into a blood drenched cult scene, and I’m not sure it was warranted) only further underlines the disparity between what the story imagines it is, and what it is in effect. 

The Walk

Written by Michael Moreci, art by Jesus Hervas, letters by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

Forrest: I hate to make the comparison just because of proximity, but this is a more effective take on what Seeds of Eden was doing. Even if the narration is a little repetitive, the mix of social and environmental commentary with horror is significantly more pointed, and the abstract of the monster fits the themes better. Hervas delivers some of my favorite art of the collection with the negative-space-defying flashlights mounted on the deep sea suits, and the totality of the darkness encroaching on them plays into the themes of invasiveness and Lovecraftian order exceptionally well. Really enjoyed this one.

Rob: The ocean really terrifies me, and so this got me too. I love the horrifying little flashes of light that appear sometimes on the suits, signifying something deeply wrong. This didn’t really feel new to me, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing here— novelty of premise is not always valuable over excellence of execution.

Killiamsburg

Written by Erick C. Freitas, art by Jelena Dordevic-Maksimovic, letters by Steve Wands

Forrest: Okay, I’m tackling this one first because I have to say “Please imagine your favorite Bon Jovi song playing in the background” is hysterical. Rob, what did you pick? I’m going, of course, with the Deadliest Catch theme, “Dead or Alive”.

Rob: I could not help but hear “SHOT THROUGH THE HEART— AND YOU’RE TO BLAME— DARLING YOU GIVE LOVE— A BAD NAME— [guitar noises].”

Forrest: Rock on. Unfortunately, with that out of the way I have to say that this is easily my least favorite story here. The title being a weak play on hipster haven Williamsburg sets the tone for the whole thing in a way it never really recovers from. The jokes are obvious down to every single drop of the craft beer, the pacing is stilted, the visuals equally so. It’s going for this Syfy channel inspired B-movie thing but its insistence on backing off of the satire to set up a team-up story (of what? Terrible people?) at the end completely undersells the last ounce of bite it had. Not for me.

Rob: The idea of a fungal plague snowman zombie apocalypse appeals to me a lot, and there are clever ideas, like the use of horrible beer as an anti-fungal— but it mostly falls flat for me too. I prefer my satire grotesque and weighty, not light and frivolous. If the aim is social commentary, I don’t think it has much to say, and if the aim is just slapstick fun, I think too much distracts from that. I recognize all of that may be a matter of taste; so I’ll say that ultimately it’s just not for me either. 

Hand Me Down

Written by Alex Paknadel, art by Jen Hickman, letters by Simon Bowland 

Rob: I found this an absolutely delightful conclusion. Cults in the new wealthy neighborhood,, marital problems and possession narratives, these are all familiar, but the lighthearted twist brought the story to a conclusion that felt, above all else, fun. I ended the collection with a smile on my face.

Forrest: I’m glad that Paknadel got to do two of these if only to show off his sheer range. This is an entirely different beast from Roofstompers, and one that I also liked quite a bit. You’ve got that playful satire of the suburban elite, the weird Exorcist flair (Hickman’s art is fun), nothing bad happens to the kid, etc. I’ll echo your thoughts that, organizationally speaking, this or Williams’ story would be the best to end on and I’m certainly not mad at it!

And with that said…it looks like we made it, Rob. We read the stories, we thought the thoughts, and we wrote the paragraphs. How do you feel?

Rob: it’s over? We’re back? I thought we’d never escape. 

Forrest: Let’s get out of — wait, did either of us edit this? Oh no…

Rob: oh no, that’s the theme! We’ve fallen due to our own hubris! Lost in an unedited document, the void of a word processor, chased forever by clippy and grammarly and SEO plug-ins, and, and, and—