Wednesday, 12 October 2011

Criminal Macabre/The Goon: When Freaks Collide (Dark Horse)

Now I really didn't want the first post in this blog to be negative, so I chose this one shot. Having enjoyed Criminal Macabre in the past, and being a big fan of Eric Powell's The Goon, I felt that this would be a sure thing. How wrong I was.

Firstly the positive points. The cover is a nice piece of work by Fiona Staples, capturing the feel of the four characters presented. Inside The Goon and Franky are given some wonderful dialogue, and there is nice interplay between Franky and Mo'Lock.

Steve Niles as the writer does a fair job of establishing the situation and characters. The first page tells us that there is a war between werewolves and vampires in a Chicago not quite of this dimension. He shows Cal Macabre and The Goon doing what they do, which is beating up monsters. This isn't the most sophisticated comic in the world, but then again it's not supposed to be, and the plot would work well.

Unfortunately the interior art by Chrisopher Mitten just isn't up to standard here. There is no clarity at all, no attempt to establish a scene. For instance, there is a scene where Franky and Mo'Lock are speaking to each other whilst Goon and Cal are fighting, is a parody of the super-hero team up cliche, when this exchange occurs:

Franky: Speak of the Devil! Look at that! What kind of freaky place did we wind up at?
Mo'Lock: I do not know, but men wearing cloaks are rarely a good thing.

However there is no sign of any man wearing a cloak in the panel, just a heap of boxes. Eventually Franky and Mo'Lock catch the cloaked man that we didn't see, and he lasts approximately eight panels before exploding. Why he explodes is not adequately explained, nor does his role in the story make much sense. Apparently he just woke up and things he thought about came real. The blame for this confusion can't be laid at the door of the artist, and sits squarely with the writer.

After this there is a little bit of fighting, although the werewolves and vampires appear to be in it together, a book is destroyed sending away some inter-dimensional entities (I assume - it is never made clear) and Hellboy turns up, which means nothing to anybody who doesn't follow Hellboy, and so leaves a very unsatisfying conclusion to a confusing mess of a story.

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