Ben Wright-Heuman’s another artist from the horror-suspense wing
of CCS, and his Letters Of The Devil webseries was successfully kickstarted to
book form. Wright-Heuman is an example of an artist who’s able to work around
his limitations to produce a successful, engrossing narrative. In his case, his
actual draftsmanship is just serviceable enough to get by. Some figures and
drawings are better executed than others, and he’s able to execute things like
gesture and body language well enough to get around other figure drawing
problems. There are times when the drawings are a distraction, but
Wright-Heuman makes up for that with a sharp script, strong storytelling and a
clever use of color.
The story begins with a mysterious figure talking about justice
and hypocrisy who delivers a letter written with red ink and sealed with wax
bearing the letter “L”. The letter, also signed with that single initial, was
delivered to a detective named Cedric and contained cryptic information
regarding a potentially corrupt financier. When the detective takes the bait
and investigates the claim (without his partner, oddly enough), a chain of
events is sent into place as various other people received letters from the
mysterious L, each one providing incriminating or interesting information about
another person.
Wright-Heuman sets up a delicate structure in his plotline that
leaves plenty of room for characterization. He keeps the reader guessing as to
whom the true protagonist might be til the very end as the story gets murkier
and murkier with each murder. There’s a sense in which every character is the
protagonist of their own story, an idea that Wright-Heuman follows closely as
each character has an excuse for their actions that falls away upon scrutiny.
Once the mystery is set into motion, the story’s gears grind away at it as
Wright-Heuman loves planting subtle clues that come to fruition much later on. The
possibility of supernatural intervention is an interesting aside that also
keeps the reader (and the characters) guessing. Above all else, he makes the
reader ask, “What kind of story am I reading?” and he chooses not to answer
that til near the very end. If there’s an author that he has something in
common with in terms of story structure, it winds up being Agatha Christie,
only he goes several steps darker than even she does.
It is rare for a comic to take me by surprise, but CCS student
Andi Santagata managed that trick when I read the first page of his mini Jed
The Undead Volume One: Fire In The Hole. There was a black “adult content” band
around the mini that I had to slide off, which made me curious about its contents.
It took me a few moments to parse his extremely thin line art and small panels
on that page, but it soon became clear that a male was masturbating to a biker
babe image, penis in hand. What was unusual that when he orgasmed, he blew a
hole in his roof. When the page is turned, we can that he’s a demonic teenager,
and the blanket that had been covering him up was still smoldering from the
explosion.
That’s quite a way to start this hilarious supernatural teen angst
comic, in which the titular Jed learns that once a demon comes of age,
ejaculation becomes a problem. Especially because he moved with his father to
Las Vegas, and simply seeing girls is torture for him. The story is very much
about the perils of adolescence write large and out of control, as he spends
this issue clumsily trying to figure things out and awkwardly explain things to
his extremely cheery father and his best friend Freddy. In possibly the
funniest two-page spread I read this year, Jed tries again (to the cover of a
Nancy Drew mystery book, of all things) and realizes that he’s about to
ejaculate. So he aims outside his open window at a tree many yards away. The
result is a spectacular direct hit that incinerates the tree and attracts the
attention of the local fire department. His efforts to shrink into his mattress
as much as possible cap off this masterfully staged scene.
The rest of the comic plays off of this problem as various
solutions are considered and abandoned, and Freddy winds up coming to his
friend’s rescue. Santagata is completely committed to his style of art and it
shows in the confidence of his storytelling, as scratchy and occasionally
difficult to scan as it sometimes is. Once the reader adjusts to his bone-dry
sense of humor and storytelling rhythms, everything else follows. I did think
this comic could benefit from the use of spot colors, at a minimum, instead of
the grayscaling he chose to use.
Chupacabra starts in a joyride in New Mexico with a teen possibly
nicknamed “Florida” by the asshole driving the car. She’s out in defiance of
her mother and is clearly intimidated by the older, cooler people she’s in the
car with. A lighter is demanded, which she provides, but it’s unacceptable
because it’s short and white, meaning it’s bad luck. Immediately, the car slams
into something, What follows is once again a mix of suspense, horror, and
comedy, with the extensive use of blacks crucial in spotlighting what’s out
there waiting for them. Santigata cleverly makes the lighter a key element of
the narrative, turning what seemed to be bad luck into a life-saving device. It’s
not as visually sophisticated as her Jed story; rather, it feels like a solid
warm-up in terms of establishing pace and mood. The only other cartoonist from
CCS I can think of who manages to combine horror and humor so effectively is
G.P. Bonesteel, though his visual approach is completely different. It’s a
small group overall to be sure, and I can see where Santagata (like Ian
Richardson) might have taken some cues from Steve Bissette.
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