Something Epic #14 // Review
A couple of investigators have come upon a dead body. It’s been dead for a long time, but it’s only just stopped moving recently. Not a single frop of blood on the body. It’s definitely dead. And since it’s a vampire it’s beyond undead as well, but its kind of difficult to tell with these things...particularly as the vampire in question IS Dracula. Detective Noa Carpenter and D Ducktive have got a hell of a homicide on their hands in Something Epic #14. Writer/artist Szymon Kudranski continues a fun pop cultural mash-up that’s as witty as it is clever.
The duck isn’t convinced. Dracula’s old enough that he’s probably got a glacial metabolism. A quick check of the pulse seems to prove that the guy’s had a more final sort of death than he’s ever had before. Naturally, there are going to be people who are going to be interested in this sort of thing...of particular note is a guy named Van Helsing. He’s there to help figure out who killed Dracula. Given the amount of fur that’s been discovered around the murder scene, the investigation is naturally going to go in the direction of the local werewolf...
Kudranski concocts a fun hardboiled detective/pop culture horror mash-up that firmly avoids a whole lot of unnecessary complexity. Only the most simple aspects of vampires and werewolves and such make it into the part of the script. There is solid foundation in Bram Stoker's original novel. The script might be kind of hard to follow up with someone not at least marginally familiar with that work. But it's surprising how invent of any immersive the story manages to be without really going into a whole lot of depth about vampire and a werewolf lore. It’s fun stuff.
There's a real difficult balance to strike with respect to the way core comedy comes to the comic book page. There are a lot of different ways of approaching it. Kudranski decides to just go straight ahead with the horror. He's perfectly well grounded in visual realism. (Y’know...aside from the duck in the trench coat and the fedora... and even that is brought to the page in a way that deals very realistic given what it is.} some of the humor is lost in the dialogue as a result. But this isn't really a major issue. Because it just looks so good on the page. And there is a certain humor and the fact that it's all conjured between two covers in a way that fields so very serious.
It's really just taking some of the more obvious bits of Halloween style horror and bringing them to the page in a way that feels fresh and new in spite of the fact that it's been around and it's current format for nearly 100 years now. The fact that it feels as new and stylish as it does is probably the single most impressive thing about the current issue of the series.
