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

  • The Massive – 9
  • Witch Doctor: Mal Practice – 4
  • And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.

    ”Locke & Key: Keys to the Kingdom” by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez

    It’s taken me a while to get around to reading this volume. I’ve had it for a good while now but often it takes me ages to get to things. Especially since I’ve been buying more monthly comics rather than collections. Reading a lot of different comics seems more interesting to me right now than reading a bunch of issues in a row of the same comic.

    I think I enjoyed this volume of ”Locke & Key” less than the other three. It’s not that it was bad. Hill can still write well and Rodriguez can still draw well but there didn’t seem to be much going on in this volume. Maybe I mean not much plot going on. There was a lot character development stuff happening but I wasn’t as interested in that. The pace was a little slow to me. I’m all for character driven stories but in a horror comic it’s out of place to me. When a couple of key, and horrifying, plot points happen it makes all the character driven stuff seem superfluous.

    Oh, and for those who don’t know, ”Locke & Key” is a horror series about a family who moves into an old house after their father dies. There is a high school aged guy, his sister who is a couple of years younger, and a grade school aged brother. They discover a bunch of keys in the house that do magical things and because of that a demon/monster/whatever wants to get a super magical key from them. They keys and what they can do were glossed over in this volume more than in the first three. There were pages and pages of interactions with the kids and their friends and then single panels of what adventures/battles happened when they found a new key. I found it a bit odd.

    If this is the first volume of ”Locke & Key” someone reads that could be a problem. They don’t catch you up on anything. The main villain is in disguise as the kids’ friend and that isn’t even noted. If you didn’t know that going in you’re going to be confused. And that villain can also change genders. I had forgotten that and it confused me.

    I know I have mostly complaints about this volume but it’s still pretty good. There is not as much horror in it as I’d like but I’m still going to track down the fifth volume sooner or later. If you want to give ”Locke & Key” a try go back to volume one though. Not all comics are like that but this one is.