House of Mystery Annual #2 (2010)

Various Writers and Artists

Vertigo. $4.99 USD

I’m going to cop to unfairness right upfront. I don’t read House of Mystery and I’m not really interested in a comprehensive review of this issue. I thought Matthew Sturges, the regular series writer, created a nice framework with these four trick-or-treaters showing up to The House, whereupon we learn they’re middle-aged and cursed to trick-or-treat forever, never growing up and out of their costumes. Then, the creative teams for other sort of magic-based Vertigo books get to play with these “kids” in their own short stories, which also serve the function of maybe getting the reader to buy one or two of those series. Fine idea, and most everybody did about what one would expect: slight, pretty efforts that don’t serve as the best introductions to their respective series, and are inessential to those already reading those books but not reading House of Mystery. It’s a meh-meh proposition. Two days later, I don’t remember anything but that the iZombie story had nice if disarmingly slick Mike Allred artwork, took place on a lake, and if not for the name you’d never know it had anything to do with zombies.

The one story that stood out for me, muy negatively, was the Matt Wagner/Brandon Graham Madame Xanadu story. Graham offers some lovely, delicate but bold art, giving me that kind of jolt I felt when Jordan Crane did The Clouds Above, a style that’s suddenly there and you don’t want it to go away. Graham’s not the issue, Matt Wagner is. He writes backgrounds for these kids, all of them horribly traumatic, and it’s like he didn’t get the memo that a) these aren’t kids anymore, and b) living as a child in a Halloween costume for forty years supplies much more fertile ground for trauma excavation than daddy and his sour whiskey smell, right? That’s what got me, the hackneyed descriptions, with Wagner trying to jam as many putrid adjectives into the narration in case the reader was unclear that, say, putting out a cigarette on a child’s torso is not going to be remembered fondly. Wagner can be a terrific, insightful writer, but here he phones it in. Wouldn’t some positive or unusual adjectives give the story an extra frisson? Daddy always chewed Fruit Stripe gum before he touched me and he usually got through three pieces before he was done, so the smell of his breath changed and got more complicated, since he didn’t spit any out, just kept adding to it. 

(with all apologies to the Fruit Stripe Zebra, and Grendel)

—Christopher Allen

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