Radiant Comics

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

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

”Hellboy: House of the Living Dead” by Mike Mignola and Richard Corben

I haven’t read a lot of Hellboy comics. Mike Mignola’s character has been around for a long time but for whatever reason I’ve never been into him. I’ve read a handful of issues here and there over the years and I didn’t hate them or anything but nor did they really grab me. The reason I’m on board with this brief fifty six page hardcover graphic novel is the art by Richard Corben. Though I haven’t been a life long Corben fan like others I know I’ve come to like his work better and better over the years and now I consider him one of the masters.

”Hellboy: House of the Living Dead” takes place in Mexico in the 1950s. It’s the story of a lost few months in Hellboy’s life when he went to Mexico to help some Mexican wrestlers fight some monsters. The monster fighting didn’t quite go as planned and this story is about Hellboy dealing with the physical and mental ramifications of the adventure’s aftermath. It’s a little sad.

This is easily the best Hellboy story I’ve read. I don’t know how it’ll stack up with a real Hellboy fan but I like it. Corben is a master story teller who can really get the reader to buy into the visual world he creates. There were a couple of confusing sequences that I had to look a twice but other than that it was all perfectly done. What can I say? I’m a gushing Corben fan these days.

The writing was good also. It was about loss and self-medication all in a strange world of monsters and 1950s Mexican wrestlers. It was sort of B horror movie-like but with better production values and a little more seriousness. I dug it.