Super Creepshow #1 // Review
Super powers have been explored from a million different angles over the better part of a century. There’s something about the horror of fantastic super powers that never really has the full opportunity to hit the page, though. Skybound explores some of the darker ends of super powers with Super Creepshow #1. The two-story anthology features a couple of twisted explorations into the darker end of superpowers. First writer Kieron Gillen and artist Rossi Gifford explore Silver Age-style radioactive mutation in a curiously romantic story. Then writer Ryan North and artist Derek Charm explore the potential downside of being able to move really, really fast.
Marcus is having some difficulty. He’s got a crush on a girl from his school. She’s cool hanging out with him, but largely just for the drugs. They’re hanging out in an abandoned home when he gets bitten by a spider...and then things start to change. Elsewhere, Ron Cooper is asked which power he’d rather have: flight or invisibility. He chooses...super speed. Of course...it’s just a fantasy, so it’s kind of a surprise to discover that he actually has what he’s got exactly what he’s always fantasized about his whole life.
Gillen’s look at a spider-man-like power turning to the monstrous end of things. It’s basically a cross between Ditko’s classic and David Cronenberg’s The Fly. Marvel had done something a little bit like this themselves at some point in the past, but Gillen really amps-up the horror in his story. North takes a look at the Flash’s power amplified to an insanely uncontrollable degree. There are shades of the script that are reminiscent of X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes by way of like...Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde, but the horror takes on its own form by the end of the issue.
There’s a visual element to the first story that feels quite comfortably grounded in the early 1980s. It’s a fun visual dynamic that gradually allows the horror to spill across the edges of the drama until it completely overtakes the page. The cleaner lines of the second story feel very cute and Archie-like in the beginning. This makes the sinister darkness that ends the story feel all the more powerful. It’s deliciously creepy stuff that holds nothing back. It’s a well-executed horror that doesn’t look like horror until it the darkness overtakes the page.
It’s reassuring that Skybound has decided to invest a bit more into this concept. It’s going to be a five-part mini-series that should be fun to explore in simple moments. And though it would be kind of cool to have all of these stories fit into some kind of hellish shared universe of horror, it’s fun just to see them do what they’re doing with isolated concepts in and within the superhero horror hybrid. There’s a lot of potential in the mash-up genre. It’ll be interesting to see where they go with it.
