BOUGHT:
The book began life as 2023-2026 four-issue Black Label miniseries (when you see Grampa's art, you'll understand why it took years to publish four issues), and is now available between a single set of covers, in a handsome "Deluxe Edition" that collects Grampa and his collaborators' story along with a substantial introduction and about 40 pages of variant covers by various all-stars and Grampa's preparatory sketches and paragraphs of prose on how the story took shape.
Now, I've been reading Batman comics for as long as I've been reading comics—about 35 years now. I sometimes despair that I have at this point read too many Batman comics, as I did when I read the first collection of current Batman writer Matt Fraction's run, as it can be hard for me to be surprised by a Batman comic at this point, and sometimes even the better-written, better-drawn ones seem filled with elements I've seen before...repeatedly.
That is not the case with Gargoyle of Gotham, which not only surprised me, but occasionally shocked me.
That said, there are many elements of it that did remind me of past Batman stories. The cult-like group of elites reminded me of Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo's Court of Owls. Batman planning to "kill off" Bruce Wayne to focus on Batman-ing full-time was part of the Bruce Wayne: Murderer and Bruce Wayne: Fugitive events. The network of young crimefighters evoked The Dark Knight Returns, Legends of the Dark Knight arc "Faith" and We Are Robin. The stuff about the occult-tinged pseudoscience about the city's energy put me in the mind of Gothic and Dark Knight, Dark City and even part of Garth Ennis and John McCrea's '90s Demon arc. The elites gathered on a skyscraper as the world—or perhaps just the city—seems to end reminded of Batman/Spawn: War Devil.
None of which is to suggest that Gargoyle is derivative of any of the above, of course; if we've seen similar things before, they are remixed and reorganized here in service of a story I don't think we ever have before.
At the story's opening, we see a Batman we are pretty much familiar with (This being a Black Label series, of course, means it takes place in its own distinct setting, rather than within Batman "canon"). Batman fights crime by means of detective work, martial prowess, gadgets and scaring the beejuzus out of the superstitious and cowardly criminals (The "It wasn't a scream. It was bait." bit on page 7 was great, by the way; that's a tactic I don't recall ever seeing). Sometimes these criminals include particularly insidious ones who, like Batman himself, are extremely colorful and have gimmicks of their own.
He is aided by his butler Alfred Pennyworth, and Gotham City Police officer Jim Gordon, his best and perhaps only ally on the police force, given his vigilante status.
Though familiar, none of this looks quite like anyone else's Batman. Seen from a certain distance, Grampa's Batman looks to be wearing the same basic gray and black that we've become accustomed to, although if you look closer, Gampa's design is distinct, unusual and...well, cooler than Batman is usually drawn. Grampa's Batman looks realistic in armored without looking overtly militaristic or like the product of a Hollywood costuming department. There's a balance that suggests a bullet might not penetrate his chest or that his cowl is actually a helmet, but he still looks lithe and graceful enough that you can imagine him running over rooftops and casting Mazzucchelli-style silhouettes.
Perhaps most notably, Grampa's Batman wears gray "chaps" over a black undersuit, suggesting the "underwear on the outside" look without Batman actually having trunks over his tights. And while I'm not sure how Grampa and/or colorist Mat Lopes achieve the effect, thin white lines are drawn over the blacks in Batman's costume, so that it looks quite detailed and rather realistic up close, while still being all-black.
There are other differences than the standard issue Batman too. Bruce Wayne is incredibly good-looking, which I don't think I've ever thought while looking at anyone's version of the character before. Grampa's Bruce is actually beautiful.
Commissioner Gordon is deeply, extremely Catholic, based on the iconography of his apartment and office...and his exclamations and, later, visions.
And that colorful villain? Well, it's not The Joker or any of the usual suspects (this series is set a few years into Batman's career, although it doesn't seem like he's encountered any of his usual rogues yet...maybe a Joker, if that's who the grinning, drooling silhouette with the white teeth seen in Arkham is meant to be.
No, this is Crytoon, one of several original villains Grampa creates here. He has a disturbing photo negative look, with white details over his black skin and clothing, and is obsessed with a particular character from the earliest days of animation. The violence he resorts to, which he cries about beforehand, is the stuff of cartoons, fighting with hammers and mallets. In one battle with Batman, he knocks the Dark Knight out by throwing an anvil at him.
While the book starts on fairly familiar, if uniquely Grampa-ized, ground, the creator immediately starts deconstructing Batman.
While the crimefighters hunt for a mysterious serial killer and Batman battles Crytoon, we learn of an untold event that happened on the night Bruce's parents were murdered, an event that is truly scary and one of those moments in which the book shocked me. It's incredibly different than anything I've seen in a previous story about that night, and while if this were an issue of Batman or Detective it might alter things in an unpleasant way, it makes a degree of sense, and fits in with what we know about Batman/Bruce Wayne and the way he lives his life.
The fall-out to this leads to a brief chapter in young Bruce Wayne's childhood, one which is hidden from him...and the why of it also makes a degree of sense as presented.
And then this leads to big, spooky, conspiracy-style mystery that involves Bruce Wayne's life, Batman's career and the nature of the city as a whole, as Grampa has the title character wrestling with where exactly the idea of Batman came from, who is responsible for his creation and what he is for.
Is he the living gargoyle of Gotham, as he thought, here apparently taking inspiration from a scary "bat-man" gargoyle he saw as a child and learned about from his mother, a frightening figure that protects the city from evil? Or was the idea planted within him by sinister, exterior forces, and he's actually a devil of sorts, meant to do evil himself?
The journey of the book involves several new rogues—Moth-er, The Virgin, Doctorgeist, Little Joker, Geisterman Wounder—some of whom seem as as much horror movie monster as comic book villain and some of whom have potential (Grampa's backmatter says he hopes that others will pick up and use these villains. Given that Gargoyle of Gotham is such a thing of its own, it might be hard to imagine, but it's not like mainstream Batman comics have imported characters from the sixties TV show or The Animated Series or elsewhere before). It involves a great deal of attention paid to class inequality in the city, the divide between exploitative rich and the exploited poor, and Bruce Wayne flailing as he seeks to find where Batman belongs. And its players include young, poor crime-fighters with "R" patches on their chests (Which stand for "Ratz" not "Robins", although a line of dialogue connects them to Robin later).
Batman ultimately discovers a truth about who he is and who he wants to be, a self-characterization that circles back to his Golden Age decision to use fear as a weapon against crime. Here's how Grampa strikingly, memorably puts it.
"The villains will come back," Bruce Wayne says to himself:
Soon.
Darker.
Madder.I'll answer with worse.
A VILLIAN TO THE VILLAINS.
This sequence accompanies the first of two new suits that Batman will adopt throughout the narrative...beyond his "original" suit, which is Grampa's own takes on Batman's usual look.
The first of these is stitched together by the Ratz as Bruce Wayne prepares to join them in a battle to save the city, climbing out of the underworld of the sewers to face the terrorism and mad acts of a populace filled with sleeper agents activated to act by the ringing of huge bells (I'm not sure if the highly stylized CLANGs that fill these panels are the work of Grampa drawing them directly into the art, as he seems to do with sound effects throughout, or letter John Workman, whose contributions are so significant it is hard to imagine this comic without him).
This is a sort of junkyard Batman, wearing work boots and gloves, wielding hammers and cloaked in black coats. He has knives taped to his forearms to form the scallops of his classic gloves, and chains and cannisters hang from his waist to suggest a utility belt. It seems completely held together with straps, wires, bandages and tape.
And then there's the "final" Batman, what Grampa tells us in his afterword is his Batman, a truly terrifying creature of armor and mechanical wings, less a Dark Knight and more a Black Knight, more demon than gargoyle. Given all the Elseworlds and multiversal stories DC has published over the last three decades or so, we have now seen a lot of different Batman costumes, many of which were specifically designed to be weird and scary-looking. This is the weirdest, scariest-looking Batman I've ever seen. (I'm tempted to share it, but think it's better encountered in context; when I first got the book, I flipped through it, and paused when I hit this page. It's hard to imagine this Batman in action*, but the context here is just him posing on the edge of a building—you know, like a gargoyle—and scaring the shit out of someone.
Perhaps when you've achieved that level of scary, you don't need to do as much running, jumping, punching and kicking.
I hesitate to call this something like a Dark Knight Returns for a new generation, something a blurb from Jeph Loeb on the cover suggests ("Every once in a generation, we are lucky enough to have a visionary who reimagines how an iconic character like BATMAN is presented," he wriest. "Neal Adams. Frank Miller. Now, Rafael Grampa has taken another giant leap forward in storytelling and illustration...").
I mean, I think we have to wait a few years to see if this book ends up influencing other comics the way DKR did...something that's actually hard to imagine, given that Miller's book's influence wasn't just because of its overall quality, but because of other factors unique to its time and context.
That said, reading through Gargoyle of Gotham felt an awful lot like being 13-years-old and reading a trade paperback collection of Dark Knight Returns at my friend's house, unable to put it down as he asked me to play Tecmo Bowl with him.
Unfortunately, this second volume is...less than ideal, due to two reasons probably outside of Campbell's control: The fact that the book is a current ongoing, which necessitates a degree of participation in other goings-on throughout the line and the fact that DC wanted to give the character a movie-inspired spotlight (and obviously wanted to include the current Supergirl writer in that spotlight).
There's a third reason I liked this a little less than the first volume—that is, it has less of Campbell's art—but we'll discuss the visuals a bit later. Suffice it to say that Campbell is one of my favorite current cartoonists, and I will always prefer reading comics that she both writes and draws over ones she either writes or draws (Although given how hard and time-consuming I personally find writing versus drawing, I wouldn't blame her at all for sticking to writing and just drawing for fun or special occasions**).
Those first two affect the flow of the book though, with the narrative thrust of the first 80 pages being interrupted—quite literally so, which is actually kind of fun—by a character from outside of the book showing up to tell Supergirl it's time to go appear in a Superman family event, which I'm not sure will be followed up in the pages of volume 3 of this series or elsewhere.
And then, because the book collects Supergirl #7-10 and the Summer of Supergirl Special, it goes on for another 40 pages. And those last 40 pages are divided into three stories by three different creative teams. And each of them is a more-or-less standalone story, with no connectivity to Campbell's ongoing Supergirl storyline, really.
So, structurally, the book is less than satisfying, and tonally, it's a bit all over the map, having three different writers and six different artists. (Joe Quinones, who draws Supergirl #9 and #10, thus does the lion's share of the art, despite the fact that his style is so different from Campbell's.) (Not that I don't like Quinone's art, of course! It's great! I just would prefer the book have a more consistent style and look and feel to it, especially when it's yet to hit twelve issues!).
That said, I'm not really sure how DC could have put the book together to avoid the weird structure. Like, Campbell did write one third of the Special, so it probably belongs in a Supergirl trade collection (and I wouldn't have liked it not being collected somewhere), but given its page count, its feels too big to serve as a back-up or epilogue, and sort of warps the narrative thrust of the mass (Perhaps DC could have included Campbell's story from the Special here, and excised the other two shorts? As we'll see later, they are hardly essential).
I don't know; I guess that's just the price one sometimes has to pay for reading comics that are published serially in trade paperback collections rather than single issues...
Anyway, this volume's four issues of the title are all organized around holidays—Thanksgiving, the Christmas season, New Year's and Valentine's Day—which makes for a nice hook and also allows Campbell to gradually fast-forward a bit (I'm not so sure I like what's going on with Lena's hair as it grows out, though; I liked it how it was!).
The first issue, the one set on Thanksgiving, is the only one that Campbell draws, starts with Supergirl being exposed to turquoise kryptonite (Yes, that's a new one) and transforming into a mermaid, which forces her into the sea. There, she meets Princess Shark, learns the character's origins and helps free her from the cures of a Sea Hag (a Sea Hag, not The Sea Hag). Meanwhile, Lesla Lar is learning about the Earth holiday, and, by the climax, pretty much the whole cast gathers around a table...including Princess Shark, who is now on the side of the angels (And, apparently, is going to stick around as part of the extended cast).
Yes, it's quite Silver Age-y, but Campbell's whole-hearted embrace of Silver Age Supergirl is a large part of what makes this title so fun and, I think, makes this particular Supergirl feel more like the "real" Supergirl as opposed to all of those many, many attempts to reinvent her over the decades (Some of which will be cataloged if not explored in one of the Special's stories, where some Superboys rattle off what seem like preposterous number of different cities she's lived in and jobs she's had).
Speaking of Superboys, Conner Kent appears in two panels, as he is apparently in attendance at the Danvers' Thanksgiving. Which is good, as it makes it less jarring when she shows up later.
Also, I'm glad Campbell drew this particular issue, as not only does it give her a chance to draw the whole extended cast, but both the Sea Hag and her little hagling, both of which look like the exact sort of gnarly things that Campbell is probably into. After this issue, Campbell only draws covers for issues #8-10 in this volume.
Next, Haining comes on as guest artist for one issue. This one focuses on the Christmas season, during which Supergirl is apparently always blue. It also gestures to her original origins, and includes a take on an old Silver Age concept that is at first scary and then tragic. I like Haining's art a lot, and think the style of it compliments that of Campbell's quite well; ideally, if the book needs fill-in artists, the editors would find a single artist to handle them and who can switch off with Campbell herself.
But that's not what happens, as Quinones then comes aboard (and only 40-is pages in, the book has already had three different artists and three different colorists!). His style is much more realistic than that of either of Campbell or Haining, and the figures often look posed, or at least drawn from reference. If they weren't all so strongly designed already, you might not know who they were meant to be out-of-context. (The nameless, shirtless goth hunk from the previous volume, for example? I only recognized him in these issues due to his distinctive pink kryptonite heart earring. Similarly, I thought Luna didn't look quite right.)
Anyway, in issue #9, Linda, Lesla, Lena and Luna attend a New Year's Eve party, where both Lena and Linda experience a degree of drunkenness thanks to some meddling on Lena's part (Lesla on purpose, as she declares "I wish to experience the effects of booze," and Linda on accident, when she takes a swig from Lesla's "soda"). Crushes are too-impulsively kissed, a couch is lifted aloft and a super-fight breaks out. By the end of the issue, Lesla is returned to Kandor and Supergirl is on the outs with Lena. (I do kinda wish Campbell had drawn this one in particular, as I'm really fond of how she drew Lesla in Kandor, before the yellow sun of Earth made her bigger and curvier. I like skinny, awkward ladies in glasses; sue me.)
And, finally, in #10, Linda goes on a date with the nameless goth hunk...and it's up to Lena and Luna to save her from the love spell his earring is inadvertently casting...and the Kryptonian entity trapped within it. It is on the last page of this issue, when Supergirl and Lena are having a heart to heart, that Superboy Conner Kent swoops in to tell Supergirl that Kandor is in big trouble, the last panel featuring a big, bold "TO BE CONTINUED IN REIGN OF THE SUPERBOYS!"
Amusingly, Campbell at least nods towards how abrupt Superboy's interruption of her story is, with Lena yelling at him, "I was in the middle of a sentence, jackass."
And that's all save for the Special. As noted, it features three different stories by three different creative teams. Two of these are team-ups, and the third features a bunch of characters talking about Supergirl, although she herself doesn't appear within it.
First, Campbell teams with the Special's cover artist Belen Ortega for "Main Man's Best Friend," a Lobo team-up. Which seems a very unlikely team-up...until you remember he was in her movie this summer. This isn't even the first time the pair teamed up this year, as this story immediately follows the events of Lobo #4, according to an editorial box.
What happened there isn't super-important, really, and I had no trouble following this story. Campbell zeroes in on something the two super-powered aliens have in common—they are both dog owners—and the comic opens with Supergirl, Krypto, Lobo and his dog Dawg (and Princess Shark) in a space court, awaiting sentencing. Lobo is sent to rehabilitation program at the Sunny Hearts Facility on the Chobos N82 Space Station, while Dawg is remanded to Supergirl's custody on Earth.
The story follows Supergirl and her two super-dogs doing good deeds in Midvale, and what happens when Lobo shows up after his program to reclaim Dawg.
Campbell does a nice job adjusting the knobs of Lobo's various portrayals until she lands on something that feels like him but also fits in with her Supergirl title. Sure, it's weird seeing Lobo doing good deeds during the team-up portion of the traditional Fight Then Team-Up ritual, but, well, dude loves his dog, right? (And he did just get out of rehab, which had managed to at least temporarily turn him into a "a fraggin' DWEEB").
Ortega's art is as great as always, and it's particularly fun to see her draw the various "versions" of the events that landed the characters in court in the first place, including an unhinged looking Supergirl and Krypto in Lobo's version.
That's followed by a Mary Marvel team-up by Gail Simone, Emma Kubert and Sandra Hope. This one felt a little...weird to me, in part because Supergirl seemed a bit off (She narrates and mentions studying; is Supergirl still in school? Really? That's weird. It seems like something readers should know by the tenth issue of her series, right?). And because the Marvel/"Shazam" Family has felt off to me for, like...30 years now...?
Mary, who is only named "Mary Marvel" in the credits panel on the last page of the story (Where it says "Supergirl and Mary Marvel in: "Lost Girls"), joins Supergirl to fight Amazonia, a female super-robot from one of Lex Luthor's labs on a rampage. This is made slightly more difficult when the robot intercepts Mary's magical lightning bolt somehow, and starts to rattle off its own robot gods...though not the powers it gets from them ("S for Superman Robots...H for Hourman....A for Amazo"...it's a cute idea, but only half-executed, and perhaps wasted, as a throwaway gag).
The robot business only takes five pages, leaving the second half of the story for Simone and company to show the two young heroines with a lot in common (And they should have a lot in common, as Supergirl's very existence was inspired by that of Mary Marvel, who predated her). This is, according to this story, their first meeting, which doesn't sound right (Surely they've met in some crossover by now, even if we're here assuming Mary Marvel continuity began with The New 52 iteration of the Marvel Family or run into one another on the JLU Watchtower...?).
And knowing the characters' real-life histories, it feels weird to have Mary fangirling over Supergirl and alluding to being inspired by her (In terms of DC continuity, I guess this is probably accurate, as the Marvel Family didn't join the DCU until the 1970s and, again, this Mary is apparently from around the time of the New 52, whereas this Supergirl has been around since the '60s, having been temporarily dead between Crisis on Infinite Earths and "The Supergirl from Krypton" arc in Superman/Batman). It's just a little thing that bugs me personally, like The Elongated Man debuting before Plastic Man in the official DC timelines, even if we know the opposite to be true in reality (Again, this reflects DC Comics publishing reality, as Elongated Man debuted in 1960, long after Plastic Man began his comic book career in 1941...although DC didn't publish a Plastic Man comic until 1961).
I didn't much care for the art style of this one, either, I'm afraid. The rendering was very realistic, although the character designs weren't necessarily all that realistic themselves.
Finally, there's "Who Is Supergirl?" by Mark Waid and Cian Tormey (Those panels above featuring the Superboys are from this story, of course, if you haven't seen Tormey's art before). This one is basically a dramatization of the character's entry in Waid's own New History of The DC Universe, with other characters talking about Supergirl's new continuity.
Superboy Conner Kent and Steel Natasha Irons are updating "the Super-Family Files" on the Justice League Watchtower (since, as Superboy puts it, "ever since that time Kilg%re infested the computers, everyone's data has been a clusterfrag").
In walks Super...guy(?) Jon Kent, and the three talk about Supergirl while updating her records, going over her Silver Age origins, her death in "the Great Crisis" and the fact that Darkseid had stolen her body (Which confuses me; would she have had a body, or would it have been erased from existence when the Multiverse collapsed into a single Earth...?***) and eventually brought her back-to-life in that Superman/Batman story arc.
"There were others who took the name while Kara was gone," Batman says, dramatically entering, and apparently referring to the Matrix version and/or the version Peter David wrote and Cir-El, "Almost as if the universe wanted there to be a Supergirl."
Similarly, Martian Manhunter walks in at one point to share some bits of her new, streamlined timeline.
Between New History of the first volume of Campbell's Supergirl, I don't think we necessarily needed all this restated again, but whatever.
The bits with Jon making fun of Superboy's leather jacket by making repeated George Michael references was weird, though. I mean, Jon was born in, what, 2015...? And here he refers to Michael twice, including a song from 1990.
Not a big fan of the art on this one either, but it seems to matter much less, given how far removed it is from the events of the main title.
It was a great package, and one that included what was essentially the first "act" of the Mirage Turtles' story, from their first introduction and initial battle with Shredder and the Foot Clan, to their meeting of long-time allies April O'Neil and Casey Jones, to their adventures in time and space (during which they would learn how exactly they were mutated), to the shocking return of the thought-dead Shredder and the Foot, to their retreat from New York City to the Northhmpton, Massachusetts farmhouse and the start of their new life there. All in all, it encompassed the entirety of their time in NYC, a terrible defeat and the start of the next chapter of their life.
This new collection is a bit different...but just a bit. In terms of contents, it only goes up through issue #10, the climactic battle in April's burning apartment building. It therefore ends on more of a down note than the previous collection of this material I have, as we see the protagonists defeated and running for their lives, but not how they process that defeat or how they start to move forward.
This new collection obviously doesn't have Farley's cover painting but instead uses the wraparound cover of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's original issue, which looks shockingly, but charmingly primitive up there (Note Donatello's sword, too!).
The paper is glossy rather than pulpy, and the dimensions are smaller than my earlier collection. At 6-by-9-inches, it seems closer in size to a DC Compact Comics collection or a Marvel Premier Edition trade, although I don't have any of those handy to compare to this.
Anyway, I have read and re-read and re-re-read these comics over and over throughout the last few decades, and thus did not re-read them anew just because I bought this new trade. But given the title, and the copy on the back, which mentions the work of other creators, I assume this is the first in a series of trade collecting the entirety of the Mirage series, so I might as well start with the first volume, so I'll eventually have the whole series on my shelf (Also, this will make a nice reference copy of the comics within; my original collection is yellowed and fragile to the point that I get nervous handling it now).
I regret having not bought the big, oversized, hardcover Ultimate Collections when they were available, as those had notes from Eastman and Laird about each issue, so I guess I'll stick with these.
By the way, I bought two copies, intending to give one to my nephew. When he told me of some recent comics he bought, he said he had bought the initial Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover, so I thought I should show him where those characters originally came from...
BORROWED:
The cover promises "Over 40 Pages of Chilling Tales!", but only 10 pages of this $7.99 special are actually new material, the other three-fourths of the book are filled with old stories with varying degrees of quality and connectivity to Halloween (How old are the comics? Well, three of the five pencil artists listed on the inside front cover are long dead).
Even those new ten pages aren't really all that great, I'm sorry to report, and read like they could have used another pass by an editor who might suggest some changes for the sake of clarification.
It opens with the title "Cosmo The Merry Martian in Haunted House Hustle!", and said merry Martian is about to enjoy his sandwich aboard his spaceship when Medulla informs him that "The W.E.I.R.D. sensor just picked up something majorly anomalous just outside a small town called 'Riverdale'." What is "W.E.I.R.D." an acronym for...? We're never told.
Cosmo investigates, only to find Archie, Jughead, Betty and Veronica in Halloween costumes, being chased by an old house with metal arms and four big, wooden legs. It is being driven by Medusa Doom, daughter of Mad Doctor Doom (You may wish to consult your Archie Encyclopedia if some of these names mean nothing to you; I certainly had to).
Cosmo is soon joined by superhero Fly Girl of the Crusaders (whose codename evokes memories of In Living Color to me, an old person) and, thanks to some advice on how one deals with houses on Halloween from Reggie Mantle, they are able to save the day. Er, night. (Reggie, for reasons entirely unclear to me, is dressed as a vampire...but also has a fishbowl-style helmet over his head, of the sort that the Silver Age Justice League would have donned to visit Aquaman in Atlantis, or spacemen in the middle of the last century might have worn).
This is the work of writer Ian Flynn and artists Bill and Ben Glavan. I think the most interesting aspect may be that the Martian and Crusaders maps seem to indicate at least the general area of the country where Riverdale might be located. (Looks like somewhere in Illinois...or possibly Wisconsin or Iowa.)
This story is followed by four more:
•Betty and Veronica in "The Secret of the Old Music Hall" This 11-page story is signed "Gladir & Decarlo, Jr.", and is thus apparently the work of George Gladir and Dan Decarlo Jr. It features The Archies (the band) rehearsing in an old, abandoned music hall and facing a series of dangerous misfortunes attributed to a ghost. There's no real Halloween connection beyond the Scooby-Doo-like plot. One can tell its relative age by its mentions of a "flash dance", MTV and the fact that, at one point, Betty pulls a car key out of the ignition.
•"Haunt Taunt" A one-page, five-panel gag strip that isn't credited, but appears to be the work of Harry Lucey, whose name is listed among the artists but not the writers on the credits page.
•"Monster Bash" A two-page strip by Samm Schwartz with some groan-inducing wordplay that culminates in a pretty strong gag at the very end.
•"Clothes Make the Monster" The strongest story in this slim collection, this 22-pager is the work of writer/pencil artist Fernando Ruiz and inker Mark McKenna. And because this one was strong enough to make me curious, I looked it up on The Grand Comics Database, and it seems to have originally been published in 2009's Archie & Friends #135.
In it, most of the gang head to a new costume shop in town in order to get costumes for Halloween. The witchy-looking proprietor outfits them all with costumes of the basic Universal monster-inspired varieties, but these are no ordinary costumes, as they literally transform the wearers into the monsters they are dressed as.
Unfortunately, her plan is frustrated by the fact that the teens' personalities—or, this being Archie Comics, each teen's single personality trait—overwhelms their monstrous impulses, so that a vampire Jughead is more interested in mooching fries than sucking blood, a mummy Chuck heads straight for the comics shop, etc.
I was a little annoyed that Dilton, who ends up saving the day, is shown working on an experiment that makes him too late to join his friends at the shop, but that experiment never comes into play in the story. Is there no Dilton's Experiment equivalent to Chekov's gun in Archie Comics...?
Anyway, if you're at all curious about this holiday one-shot, I would recommend seeing if your local library has Hoopla and reading it for free. I don't think 40 brand-new, high-quality pages are worth $7.99, let alone 10 so-so new pages and 30 pages of reprints. God knows your eight bucks can go a lot further at archiecomics.com and, last time I was in the grocery story, I noticed a much fatter Archie Comics Digest Halloween Special for just $9.99.
REVIEWED:
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