Super Creepshow #3 // Review
There’s a powerful extra-terrestrial coming to Earth to help out the hominids who are destined to be our ancestors. Is this really a good idea? Ancient alien theorists say yes, but there are some serious issues with this. Elsewhere in time, there’s a hero who is forced to make a Faustian bargain that might turn-out to be a mistake in Super Creepshow #3. Writer/artist James Harren tells the tale of ancient Earth. Writer Brandon Thomas and artist Juann Cabal look into the tale of good intensions with colorist Fares Maese. Once again...it’s a deeply enoyable two-story issue pulled from the darker side of traditional superhero stories.
The villain Domulus is fleeing to the small blue world that is third from the sun. A powerful hero leaves thos he has already helped on the rocky, red world. The primitive inhabitants on that planet are allowed a bit of power from off-world with which to defeat Domulus. Then in a far more contemporary world, there is a hero named Abyssal who is consulting with a powerful being in a temple. The oracles have warned Abyssal of an attack on his kingdom and he’s come to ask fro help.
An extraterrestrial involvement in humans throughout history has been a common and recurring theme in traditional superhero comic books going pretty far back. Rarely is the complicated nature of this sort of thing really examined in full detail. Harren’s tale does a good job of delivering the complexity in a very short span of pages. Brandon Thomas’ story delve into some of the deeper implications of some of the massive amount of power that so often is falling across the page in the superhero comic book. Any interest of telling a well crafted story, the first principles of this can often be overlooked. Thomas renders a great degree of sophistication in only a few few pages.
Harren’s Kirby-inspired art moves thoughtfully and cunningly across the page. It delivers a sense of the fantastic without sparing the deeper drama of the story he's telling. The layout of the pages allows for some pretty dramatic changes in scale and perspective throughout the story. Cabal amplify the drama to a rather overwhelming degree in the second story. The deafening sense of the drama really had quite a bit to the intensity of everything.Maese’s color create a richly textured and beautifully immersive world for the story to exist in.
With so many superhero stories being derived from long and exhaustive decades-long serials, a computer, kind of difficult to imagine trying to tell a self-contained the story about exist in its own little universe in just a few pages. So often these sorts of things can feel very flat and two dimensional. Super Creepshow continues to take a dark look at superheroes in a way that constructs remarkably well balanced worlds that rest in the background of very concisely told stories. It's been a remarkably well-articulated series.
