Creepshow [2023] #1 - Image Comics

CREEPSHOW No. 1, September 2023

Whilst American special effects guru Greg Nicotero is probably right when he states at the start of this comic’s “Creep Corner” letters page that the anthology’s “bite-sized horror jaunts are increasingly satisfying”, it’s arguably difficult to imagine just how this mini-series could get off to a more controversial start than Garth Ennis’ truly disconcerting narrative entitled “Make Your Choice”. True, artist Becky Cloonan luckily never actually pencils any of the incest or the young daughter’s subsequent abortion which forms the backbone of this ten-pager’s plot. But the tale’s sheer assault upon the senses with innumerable blood-splattered human foetuses and unnecessary expletives is probably more than enough to make the yarn utterly unpalatable as it is.

To make matters worse though, the Northern Irish–American author appears to have completely forgotten about the “frequently funny” element to the franchise’s storytelling which made Stephen King and George A. Romero’s original movie “the highest grossing horror film for the Warner Brothers studio” in 1982. Preferring instead to simply pad out the incessant carousel of panels populated by grisly-looking babies with an endless stream of swear words, religious-based profanities, and grotesquely ghoulish mental images; “Oh dear God above, the Devil got into her! The Lord of the Flies, Beelzebub, he got into her when she came of age and he set her to tempt me!”

Slightly more ‘honourable to the genre’ is Phil Hester’s “Fossil Record”, which rather intriguingly follows a distraught palaeontologist down into deep madness following the death of the young man’s mother. Decidedly tongue-in-cheek, owing to both the clumsiness and excitability of August, the Iowa-born writer’s premise that a previously undetected species actually caused the great extinctions of the planet’s past makes for an intriguing read.

However, once the Eisner Award-nominee begins pencilling Professor Heinrich’s underground warren of hand-dug tunnels, things turn much more macabre, with the realisation that the killer species might actually have lured the mentally unstable protagonist to his doom, when it somehow realised he had discovered their shadowy presence. This change of pace is extremely well-penned and leads to an excellent zombie-filled chase back to the graveyard where the elderly Missus Hodgson was only recently buried.

Writers: Garth Ennis and Phil Hester, and Artists: Becky Cloonan and Phil Hester