Comics I Bought This Week: August 11, 2012

Aug11
on August 11, 2012 at 6:00 am
Posted In: Comics I Bought This Week

I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got eight new comics:

  • Archer and Armstrong −1

  • Godzilla: The Half Century War – 1

  • Harbinger – 2

  • The Massive – 3

  • Hoax Hunters −2

  • Grifter – 12

  • Dancer – 4

  • Night Force – 6

    • And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.

    ”Ragemoor” Issues 1-4 (of 4) by Jan Strnad and Richard Corben

    I’m on board for any new Richard Corben project so as soon as I saw that this series was coming out I put it on my pull list at my local comic shop. Corben is a master cartoonist and I’ve liked everything he’s done in recent years and this is no exception. Jan Strnad is a name I haven’t seen in a while. He wrote a comic in the mid 80s called “Dalgoda” that I liked. I think I bought and liked other things he has written but it’s been such a long time that I don’t remember what they are.

    ”Ragemoor” is the story of a castle. It has a familiar setup. A nephew from the big city moves to his ancestral home (somewhere in Europe I assume) and soon his own devious plans to take over the castle and grab the family money is thwarted by the fact that the castle is not as it seems. It’s a cursed and haunted place.

    This story reminds me of countless English haunted house/castle movies where a bunch of people stand around a cursed place and wait for chandeliers to fall on them. I always had a problem with those movies because even though they could drip with atmosphere hardly anything scary ever happened in them. ”Ragemoor” differs from them because actual frightening things take place.

    There is a crazy old butler, a swindling love interest, a local Romeo, apes who wear bone armor, centipede warriors, half insect men, stone birds, and lots of other crazy Corben monsters. Unlike so much other Lovecraft inspired stuff I could see why the castle could actually drive people crazy. I believed it and that’s something that rarely happen with the horror genre for me.

    Strnad’s writing has a formality to it at times that is right in line with the haunted castle genre and at other times he writes crazy ranting butler stuff. It all worked for me. I can’t say much more about Corben than he is a great story teller and knocks it out of the park every time. ”Ragemoor” is definitely worth a look.