July 17, 2009

Zombos Says: Good

You don't quite look ready for six feet of cold dirt and hungry worms yet. And I ought to rest a spell, because I got a feeling business is going to be booming directly. So how's about a little story? Just to pass the time (The Digger, Dirt 1)

Scott Nicholson pens the stories for Dirt, the six-issue series from Post Mortem Studios. If you have read Nicholson's short story, The Shaping, in Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet, you already know how he can take a familiar scenario and suddenly veer off in an unexpected and unnerving direction that leaves a chill on your neck or a butterfly in your stomach. Will he be able to capture his terse, poetic, sentence rhythm and narrative point of view within the confining panels and commercially dictated page count of the modern comic book format? Certainly, his penchant for second-person narration provides a natural bridge to using the horror host-styled delivery of story-telling.

For horror comic book fans there is nothing as familiar as the mysterious, often imperious, host introducing each illustrated vignette. Either undead, alive, moldy or loathly, the host helps keep things personal through his or her lively quips and sometimes sardonic observations on the bizarre goings-on and strained social entanglements presented in each story. With Nicholson's North Carolina country-twang writing sensibility potentially loading the shovel-fulls of terror, something unique happening between the panels is possible here as his host, The Digger, turns up each story for us and pats it tightly down when done. Unfortunately, The Digger must have hit pay dirt and quit his day job because, after his appearance in all three stories of issue one, he only appears on the cover of issue two and two panels inside.

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Comic Book Review: Post Mortem Studios’ Dirt 1, 2Read More »