Creepshow #1 // Review
A few clowns run into the darker edge of human nature and a cancer award of a Children's Hospital. And maybe there might just be some happiness in the darkness.. Elsewhere there's a giant finger that's come down from the stars. That would be weird enough, but things take a particularly dark turn. People are getting quite sick in a horrifyingly grotesque and terminal condition that is clearly connected with the sudden appearance of the finger from space. .The venerable Creepshow is back with another #1 featuring work by writer Tyler Boss, artist Francesca Ciergia and writer/artist Lorenzo De Felici.
St. Dude’s Children’s Hospital is no place for weak souls. Every one of the kids in the cancer ward is forced to deal with news that any adult would be horrified of. The clowns are trying to help as best as they can. Jellybean’s sense of humor might not actually fit, though. He is, after all, pulling out a chainsaw I am at children's hospital. Elsewhere, there’s a sudden appearance of something very, very big and very, very tall in an otherwise empty field. Odd that it would happen to be a finger. Odder still: the dog that got particularly close to the thing starts breaking out in large, red sores...
Boss’ story doesn't go terribly far for the horror. There’s real challenge of bringing clowns to a comic books story in a way that makes her original horror. It's this sort of thing that's been done a lot. There is a visual appeal to the story that carries a lot of weight. De Felici does a really impressive job of bringing a very unique sort of alien invasion story to the second half of the issue. It's novel. It's interesting. It's very, very deeply weird. And it's well worth the cover price entirely on its own.
Ciergia could easily have gone in a much darker direction with respect to the art for the opening story. The clowns look very traditional. There's really nothing that's necessarily very disturbing about the way they look. But there's nothing terribly striking about it either. The strength in Ciergia’s visuals lies entirely in the storytelling. De Felici tries horror from a strange object to the position between various things. The horror of a very nasty condition locks in much of the darker end of this visuals for the second half of the issue.
The fifth series of Creepshow is off to a really good start with the first issue. A simple execution of a basic premise is paired with a stylistically and the conceptually complicated piece that ends the issue. It's a really good package. It's a really good pairing. It will be a lot of fun to see where the anthology goes from here. Skybound has done a good job with the opening to the latest series in a franchise that goes back 44 years now. It may have taken a while for the Creepshow brand to gain momentum, but Image and Skybound are doing a remarkably good job with it.
