Comics: Hats off, gentlemen.

As with so many reviews, I begin this one with a disclaimer. To wit: I'm not your most pop culture savvy horror-blogger.

I don't, for example, watch any television until it pops up on DVD. This is a technical limitation of my television set-up and not an ethical or political stance. My wife and I never bothered to hook up the ol' cable when we moved in and the "garden" level apartment we live in doesn't get a signal on the rabbit ears. Now, nearly seven years after we've moved in, shelling out for something we've done fine without seems silly. Especially these days, when one of us is sporadically employed and the financial pages are considerably scarier than anything bearing the "horror" genre brand. Not that I'm against television. We actually watch quite a bit of television. We're just always several months behind everybody else. Occasionally several years behind everybody else: my dearest and I's latest obsession has been The Addams' Family, meaning we're now caught up with the cutting-edge audiences of 1966.

I bring this up because this pop cultural ignorance means I occasionally step into the middle of a phenomenon, blithely walking into some massive franchise the way white explorers in old Tarzan flicks seemed to home-in on quicksand. I'll pick up a flick, book, or comic and complete it, only to realize latter that, to fully understand what's going on, one needs to have consumed a boat-load of books, several films, and perhaps played a videogame or two. Kinda like the time I purchased a Battle Royale manga and thought I was seeing something new and fresh, only to later be told that BR is a goldmine property in Japan: starting with a best-selling novel, going through two movies, and a 15 volume manga series.

Such is the case with Hatter M, a trade comic collection I picked up merely because the art was from Ben Templesmith. Turns out that Hatter M is a part of a massive mutlimedia exercise in world building. If you really want to figure out what the hell is going on in Hatter M, you need to have read this Eisner-nominated comic, worked through two or three YA novels, played a Magic-style card game, and Lord only knows what else.

So this review of Hatter M comes from a dude who has not, and does not intend to, become familiar with the novels, the game, the chewing gum, the t-shirts, or anything else that would otherwise flesh out the world of Hatter M. If you have done any of this, you already knew 2 billion times what I know about this comic and you should quit reading this blog. And perhaps go outside. And talk to a real woman. Perhaps go on a date – during which you will not discuss the Looking Glass War franchise. Seriously. Get out more.

That said, here's an admittedly limited review of Hatter M . . .

A four ish limited series, the Eisner-nominated Hatter M, penned by Frank Beddor with art by Ben Templesmith, is a dark fantasy/action tale loosely inspired by Lewis Carroll's iconic Wonderland stories. And when I say "loosely," I mean that term in the broadest way you can conceive of the concept. I'm using it in the way one might say, "The Sydney Opera House is loosely based on the Parthenon insomuch as both are buildings."

The eponymous hatter of Hatter M is Hatter Madigan. The world of the Looking Glass War, a growing invasion of the real world by an alternate reality fueled by human imagination, hatters are sort of the equivalent of Texas Rangers: they're bad-asses sent on a one riot, one ranger basis to handle particularly tricky jobs. Madigan was assigned to be the bodyguard of Princess Alyss, a royal of Wonderland directly in line to the throne who fled to the real world, circa 1859, when the royal palace was targeted by rebellious distaff members of bloodline making a violent bid for the throne.

Disgraced that he has lost his charge, Madigan hops through mid-19th century Europe hunting for Alyss. Along the way he runs across other Wonderland ex-pats, creativity junkies who feed off imagination, Kafka-esque anti-imagination educators, and Jules Verne.

"Okay," you might well say. "But how does a mad hatter bodyguard anybody? What does he do, serve tea to attackers? Fight bad guys with nonsense riddles?"

Hatter Madigan's primary weaponry consists of a forest of spinning blades that seem to be able to emerge from any surface on his person or, if necessary, project from his body.

"What? That's got nothing to do with the Mad Hatter."

What you can't see me doing over the Internet is me touching my nose.

This sort of WTF linkage is typical of the series. The Cheshire Cat is now a sort of breed of assassin were-cat, the card soldiers appear to be robots of some sort, the Queen of Hearts is now just one member of an elaborate and extended royal family that includes, oddly enough, Alice, now spelled Alyss.

I don't get it either.

As an exercise in world building, the ideas behind Beddor's Wonderland aren't bad. And the trade edition comes with a handful of nice extras meant to flush out the concepts. Really the only problem is the connection to Carroll, which seems so irrelevant as to be distracting. Beddor's take isn't even a satire or a revisionist undertaking along the lines of, say, Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentleman. In fact, the less you know of the originals, the better you'll like Beddor's Wonderland. If you're familiar with the original stories, you'll just wonder what the heck Beddor's smoking.

The other issue is Templesmith's art. In Hatter M, Templesmith is actually developing a more comic-friendly style. There are several pages where Templesmith manages to make his abstracted, dream-like art communicate motion and action. But, overall, the team of Beddor and Templesmith seems like a poor fit. Templesmith's art is minimalist and doesn't lend itself to Beddor's complicated world building. Furthermore, Templesmith's action sequences are incomprehensible. This isn't a problem in titles like Wormwood, which treat action sequences as vaguely embarrassing things that comic characters must do – they are the proctologist visits of the comic world. But Hatter M is first and foremost an action title. The murky and incomprehensible fight scenes are a disappointment.

Hatter M is an odd beast. On it's own, it isn't bad. The art could flow a little better, but it has a phantasmagoric feel that isn't inappropriate. The writing moves along and there is creativity to burn here. But hanging over the whole affair is the blatant, but then pointless connection of Carroll. One is forced to wonder if was just easier to sell to publishers if it bit off a famous brand.

Movies: 29 days of night.

Over at Comic Book Resource blog Comics Should Be Good they run a regular feature on rumors, urban legends, and lingering questions regarding comics and the comic biz. Recently, they had a curious bit about the history of the recently adapted vampire mini-series 30 Days of Night.

From Comics Should Be Good:

COMIC URBAN LEGEND: 30 Days of Night was a movie pitch BEFORE it was a comic book series.

STATUS: True

The success of Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith’s 30 Days of Night comic was an influential event in comic book history, as the series demonstrated to many others the value of having a comic book to use to make a movie pitch. Soon, a great deal of independent publishers began to look at comic pitches as basically, “Could this be optioned for a film?”

Reader Kris N., though wrote in last week to ask, “Is it true that 30 Days of Night was a movie screenplay before it was a comic?”

And the answer, interestingly enough, is basically yes.

I say basically only because it was not actually a screenplay, but the development from comics to film for 30 Days of Night did, in fact, begin in the realm of film.

I think Steve Niles can tell the story better than I can, so here he is, courtesy of an excellent article by Scott Collura and Eric Moro over at IGN.com:

“I pitched it as a movie for two or three years,” recalls Niles, who prior to 30 Days has been best known for his work in the comics industry. “I pitched it to just blank faces. And they’d say, ‘It sounds like Buffy, it sounds like Buffy.’ And honestly I had just about given up.”

Following the rejection of the 30 Days pitch, Niles continued to focus his energies on his comics work, writing various books for Todd McFarlane including Spawn: The Dark Ages and Hellspawn. It was on the latter comic that he first worked with Ben Templesmith, a first-time artist who would go on to partner with Niles on the 30 Days comic.

“It was just one of those weird things,” says the scribe. “Ted Adams from IDW called and said, ‘We want to do some comics. We can’t pay, there’s no money, but you can do whatever you want.’ So I just pulled out a sheet of my pitch list and said, ‘Here’s pitches that nobody ever bought.’ And he was like, ‘This vampire in Alaska thing looks kind of cool!’ Ben liked it, IDW wanted to do it, so we just did it and didn’t get paid a dime. And the day the ad for the first issue hit, we started getting calls from every studio, every producer, even people I had pitched before. People to this day deny that they rejected it, and I love it! Even one of the producers on the movie had originally rejected it.”

Movies: Good night.

I think one can say, without fear of overstatement, that Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith's vampire horror mini-series 30 Days of Night is the single title most responsible for jump starting the revival of horror comics. Go into some comic book specialty store and, on any given month, you'll find a short stack of new horror titles, from Eisner-winning continuing series to re-launched anthology series to gore-splattered one shots and collections. Though this is a relatively recent phenomenon. When IDW, then a new publisher on the comic scene, ran with 30 Days of Night, there were so few horror titles out that you could be forgiven if you thought the entire genre had gone the way of the dodo.

Its place of the comic in genre history threatens to overshadow its genuine merits. Unlike other comic milestones, such as Contract with God or The Watchmen, 30 Days f Night isn't a revolutionary work. The slim (under 90 pages) but attractive book relied on straight-forward and tradition narrative techniques; featured a cast of characters that were fairly stock types; didn't push the boundaries of comic content; and had a phantasmagoric painted art style that is not the norm, but clearly owes much to pioneers like Dave McKean. But the value of 30 Days didn't rest on its revolutionary potential. Instead, what it did was show readers and the industry that well-done horror comics could still kick ass. It didn't need to be a great work of literature. It didn't need to fundamentally shift the way in which we thought of sequential art. It just needed to prove that the supposedly moribund horror genre still had some unlife in it.

And that's exactly what it did.

The premise of the comic was brilliantly simple: in Barrow, Alaska, where the sun vanishes for an entire month in winter, a group a vampires, no longer checked by the regular coming of the dawn, come to ravage the town. It's high concept perfection. Even on hearing it, you think, "Of freakin' course, why didn't anybody think of that before?" The plot is about as lean and mean as you can make. There is a slight detour involving the efforts of ancient vampires to keep the existence of vamps a secret and the efforts of a crew of folks from the Big Easy trying to blow the lid off the undead cover-up. But that's a slight intrusion on what is otherwise a straight out story of survival against impossible odds. Basically, it did what the writers of zombie tales quickly discovered was the key to crossover success: it was vampy story as disaster story.

David Slade's new adaptation, the film 30 Days of Night, is, I think, the best adaptation the comic could have hoped for. The protagonists of the comics were a husband and wife team of police officers in Barrow. The other residents of Barrow were basically there to get eaten or get saved. Slade's adaptation complicates the relationship of the central couple (played adequately by the wooden Josh Hartnett and the creepily skinny Melissa George – Melissa, sweetie, I thought it was a special effect or something; we're all worried about you) and adds a handful of fleshed out residents to serve as the holdout crew we'll follow through the assault. The adaptation also wisely cuts out the subplot involving ancient vamps and the vampire hunters. These subplots went nowhere in the original comic and aren't missed here. Trading them off for more time to flesh out the other victims of the assault is a smart choice.

Slade also works from a screenplay, partially created by Steve Niles, that decompresses the action. The original comic – partially due to the limitations of space, partially due to the artistic style of Templesmith (which is better at mood than action) – had a dream-like logic that didn't lend itself to action or suspense. Instead, it was like looking into a nightmare. The film expands on the conflict between the vamps and the humans, with several excellent action/horror set pieces, and manages to build up an entertaining amount of tension with regards to who will and will not make it at the end of the flick.

The film also expands on the role of the Renfield-like "Stranger": the human thrall of the vamps who heads into Barrow prior to the long night, prepping the town for invasion. The flick also more closely associates him with Renfield, making the ties between him and the character of the ur-vamp tale more explicit. In the comic, the Stranger shows up out of nowhere, makes some threats, and that's about it. Here, we see him arrive via ship (with the vamps, just like Renfield and Drac) and he makes his servile relationship clear.

Finally, though the film has some genuine shots of beauty, Slade is selective in his efforts to capture the look of Templesmith's art. He avoids the slavish visual loyalty one sees in many current comic adaptations. The vampires look very much like Templesmith's monsters. These are not suave, seducers. They have shark-like mouths, never bother to clean the gore of their animalistic feeding off of themselves, and dress like homeless Euro-trash. In one scene, the lead vamp actually slicks back his hair with the blood of a victim his ripped open. That's the sort weird rawness Templesmith brought to his vamps and it is captured here. But, for the most part, Slade eschews the dream-like surrealism of Templesmith's art. People will argue about this, but I think it is a smart move. What film can give us that comics can't is the sense of bodies moving through space. In film, a sense of space is crucial to creating tension and action. Recreating the look of the comics would have hobbled the film.

The chief problem with 30 Days of Night is that the film does not share the relationship to film horror that the original comic shared to the genre of horror comics. The original comic simply had to be good to instantly become the best horror comic on the market. The comic just had to prove that horror comics were still viable. But the film comes out on what might be the tail end of a long and remarkably creative horror flick boom. There's a way in which the film can't just be "good." To stick out, the film would have to be brilliant. Unfortunately, it isn't brilliant. 30 Days is a well-made, solid flick. It doesn't drag, it doesn't make you feel stupid for paying 10 smackers for your ticket, and you'll feel a couple of "holy moley" moments. That's nothing to sneeze at. That may be a modest success, but it is undeniably a success. But it can't recapture the eye-opening excitement of the original comic. That feeling was a product of the unique moment the comic was released. Even the comic, picked up now, can't recreate that experience.

Comics: Give you nightmares. Free nightmares.

Maybe anthologies are the new zombies. Though we're hardly wanting for ghoul-oriented fare - Walking Dead from Image shambles on, Marvel's Zombies are coming back for their third mini-series, and so on and so on – it seems like the explosive growth of the trend is over, we're headed into the long-awaited retrenchment, and it is high time for something new.

Let me propose, dear Screamers and Screamettes, that the next BIG thing in horror comics is the antho. Hear me out. Several one shots and mini-series have already come out from Marvel: the mostly campy Marvel Monster Group comics and more serious Legion of Monsters one shots. Viper put out Sasquatch. The daddy of all antho comics, Tales from the Crypt, can be found back on the comic rack. Doomed, a sort of neo-Tales, has made it to its first collection. DC hasn't yet re-launched House of Mystery, but give it time – they've got the Showcase editions of the original up to the second volume and that's got to be tripping off some sort of alarm in accounts receivable.

Into this crowded and competitive marketplace steps the young, polymath upstart of the Fox empire, Fox Atomic, with their recently released The Nightmare Factory.

I'll be honest, I did not have high expectations for this book. Fox Atomic has already dipped its toes into the comics field: it released prequel tie-ins to 28 Weeks Later and The Hills Have Eyes 2, the former filling the space between the two zombie flicks and the latter providing some insight into the origins of the miner-turned-mutant franchise villains. I thought both efforts were middling outings that seemed too much like the marketing pieces they were intended to be. It was promising that this book had no clear flick tie-in; but you can't fault a twice-bitten dude for being a little gunshy.

To my pleasant surprise, The Nightmare Factory is freakin' fabulous. Fox Atomic has picked up some hints from the excellent Doomed and, like the student that has become the master, taken all they've learned a step further.

First, they swiped Doomed's line-up. The weirdly old-timey cover is the work of Doomed cover regular Ashley Wood and you can find the art of Doomed alum Ted McKeever within. After skimming some of the cream from Doomed they pulled marquee-name Ben Templesmith and Sandman vet Colleen Doran to art duties. That's a serious collection of fantasy/horror artists.

Next, they found primo source material and built the collection around it. Much the way Doomed maintains a coherent feel, despite the varied artist, by tapping the same authors again and again, The Nightmare Factory gives you the feel of a complete and unified work by concentrating on a single author: Thomas Ligotti. And, in choosing Ligotti, a cult figure who deserves greater recognition, NF actually outdoes its predecessor. Ligotti is a masterful practitioner of the "weird tale," part of the line of surreally existential horror writers who trace back through Bradbury (at his darkest), Lovecraft, and Poe. His works are darkly fantastic tales delivered with flawless precision of detail and control of tone. Wisely, instead of just handing Ligotti's work over to the artists, adaptation duties were handed over to Eisner winner Stuart Moore and vet horror screenwriter Joe Harris.

But don't take my word for it. See for yourself.

As you may or may not know, my wife is a bit of notable blogger in the world of book reviews, book retail, and the like. She was in communication with Fox Atomic about doing a Nightmare Factory-related Halloween event at the bookstore in which she works. The cats at Atomic asked if she'd be interested in doing a book giveaway on her blog. Horror's not her bag, so she sent them ANTSS-ward. Well, Screamers and Screamettes, her loss is our gain. First five fans to email your fave Screamin' blogger at CRwM44@yahoo[dot]com will receive a free copy of The Nightmare Factory. Is CRwM the most right-on reviewer ever? Is he utterly full of horse putucky? You make the call. Just shoot me an email with a mailing address and the book will be on its wicked little way. Free; gratis; like freesville, man. Can't beat that with a stick. Don't say your ol' pal CRwM never did nothin' for ya.

Comics: Templesmith on sentient maggots, squid-heads, and whether he hates the Irish or not.

Comic Book Resource is featuring an amusing interview with comic illustrator Ben Templesmith, the influential co-creator of 30 Days of Night (which helped rejuvenate the horror comic) and creator of Wormwood, a funny, sleazy, horror-tinged dark comedy about a sentient maggot who can enter corpses and pilot them sort of like the way big-eyed anime characters drive around mechs (only, instead of fighting giant robots, the titular worm tends to take his re-animated corpses to demonic nuddie bars and underground leprechaun knife-fighting pits and the like).

The comic art of Ben Templesmith seems to be a bit of a love/hate proposition. His lavish, mixed-media work tends toward the phantasmagoric. It has a fluid, highly stylized, dream-like quality to it. The anatomy of his characters is unstable and empathic, rather than rigorous and objective. When 30 Days of Night came out, many detractors argued that his art was a distraction. Critics felts that the plot, a clever, but fairly straight forward, vampire rampage tale, was diminished by the overly-strange, almost aggressively abstract art. Famed comic writer Warren Ellis, in discussing his own horror series Black Gas, even mentioned taking deliberate efforts to bring horror art back to a sort of high-res, detail-heavy gore look and pull it away from the hallucinatory aesthetic of Templesmith (this is, in my opinion, a bit of an overreaction – most horror comics still resemble the traditional, comfortably representational style of Ellis's book and not Templesmith's work).

While I understand 30DoN's critics, I thought that Templesmith's work on that title was not only effective, but necessary. The book was a bold re-insertion of the horror genre into the comics mainstream and it needed art that would immediately stand-out and provide artistic weight to the project. If you're planning a grand return, you can't risk being ignored. Templesmith's art helped make sure that didn't happen. If the art seems too quirky and perhaps too fussy now, it may be because it was suited to a very specific moment, answering the needs of a very specific context. I still think it is boss, but the head scratching of non-fans is somewhat understandable.

Templesmith's solo series, the more light-hearted and humorously nasty Wormwood, is, I think, a better showcase for his art. The bizarre stories he tells – described by some as a sit-com version of Hellboy - are more surrealistic and trippy, meaning his art style reinforces the central mood rather than working as a counterpoint. I think even people dubious about 30DoN might want to give Templesmith's solo stuff a look.