Harrow County #5 - Dark Horse Comics

HARROW COUNTY No. 5, September 2015

Rather enthusiastically described by “Nailbiter” author Joshua Williamson as “one of the best horror comics I’ve ever read”, Cullen Bunn’s narrative for Issue Five of “Harrow County” is arguably far more akin to a piece of fiction penned by child-friendly J.K. Rowling than a Bram Stoker Award nominee, as the title’s protagonist simply goes about her daily duties of fixing supper, chatting with her friend Bernice, and negotiating the co-habitation between her town’s superstitious population and the plentiful ghosts and goblins who lurk “in damp cellars… crumbling and abandoned churches… [and] the muddy bottoms of near-stagnant fishing holes.” Indeed the American author’s scariest moment within this twenty-two page periodical is not the young girl’s meeting with “some kind of screeching devil” housed within Mefford Brothers grain house, or even the teenager’s confrontation with the four-eyed demonic bull sheltering in a derelict cabin. But actually turns out to be Jim Webb’s deeply disturbing request that Emmy permanently maim (or kill) a man called Cribbets, just because “he’s got his eye on my wife… Celia…”

This apparent abandonment of everything which previously has caused the Carolina-born writer’s work to be a “super creepy” experience, such as setting the entire book’s narrative during a bright sunny day rather than a haint-haunted night, must have undoubtedly disappointed many of this “Dark Horse Comics” publication’s 8,706 readers in September 2015. It certainly seems odd that Tyler Crook’s short story “The Bat House” can prove an infinitely more disconcerting read with its single-page tale of Earl Henry braving a vermin-stuffed attic, than the magazine’s lead feature “Twice Told”.    

Mercifully, Crook’s “art and lettering” for Bunn’s apathetic script are first rate, with the artist seemingly trying to use the setting’s brightness to highlight both the loving relationship Emmy’s father has somehow managed to re-establish with his daughter since trying to throttle her, and the young blonde’s valued friendship with Bernice; “Sorry I’ve been a stranger. I just wasn’t sure what to even say to you.” Sadly however, this opportunity to focus upon exemplifying the cast’s varying emotional states to the reader does mean that the “Petrograd” penciller’s cover illustration of Emmy and her twin sister seemingly being menaced by Hester Beck’s black-furred horned beast is in fact, regrettably, the book’s most sinister-looking piece of artwork.

Script: Cullen Bunn, Art and Lettering: Tyler Crook, and Publisher: Mike Richardson

Harrow County #4 - Dark Horse Comics

HARROW COUNTY No. 4, August 2015

Whilst undeniably proving to be a twenty-six page periodical which quite neatly ties up most of the plot-threads from the title's "Countless Haints" story-arc, Issue Four of "Harrow County" must surely have disappointed some of its 8,893 readers with the illogically contrived manner in which it does so. For having spent the best part of the lengthy narrative fearfully fleeing her Pa and fellow townspeople because “she knows we want her dead”, Emmy bizarrely returns to where the ‘lynch mob’ are congregating and supposedly convinces them to let her reside amongst them despite disintegrating three of their number when they murderously launch themselves upon the young witch; “I don’t want to hurt anyone… Not you… Not the other folks who live hereabouts.”

Admittedly Cullen Bunn does try and rationalise this arguably incongruous behaviour on behalf of his story’s main protagonist, by having Mister Sorrell illuminate her as to Hester Beck’s creation of men and women “from the mud” during a rather dialogue-heavy sedentary sequence. But the suggestion that the settlement’s local folk have been lead to their homicidal resolution by a number of cruelly misguided mud-people, who “genuinely believed Hester was a creature of evil” and “thought they would never truly be alive until their creator was dead”, is perturbingly far-fetched.

Fortunately, despite these reservations as to the teenager’s guileless behaviour, the Bram Stoker Award-nominee’s script does still contain plenty of “genuinely creepy and engaging” moments. The comic’s opening, within which Emmy faces a ferociously huge, multi-eyed black-furred demon in the woodland, provides a wonderfully tense confrontation that momentarily actually looks like being a rather fatal meeting for the flush-cheeked blonde. Whilst Mister Sorrell’s overly-friendly, bespectacled countenance proves as disturbing a characteristic for a child kidnapper as any Film Noir writer could wish for.     

Possibly somewhat fatigued by this edition’s extra page count, or perhaps because so much of the tale is confined to well-lit locations, Tyler Crook’s artwork also seems to be a little worse for wear towards the end of this comic book. The American artist’s initial pencils and water colours depicting the long-forgotten bull-horned forest-dwelling fiend are wonderfully detailed, as are the panels depicting the stark terror etched upon the fledgling witch’s face as she flees the monster’s furious assault. Yet some of his illustrations concerning the ruddy-faced child snatcher, the skinless haint, and Emmy’s badly battered father aren’t quite as well-realised as perhaps they would have been in previous issues…

Script: Cullen Bunn, Art and Lettering: Tyler Crook, and Publisher: Mike Richardson

Harrow County #3 - Dark Horse Comics

HARROW COUNTY No. 3, July 2015

Despite depicting fiery ghosts rising from beneath their long-forgotten grave markers, the haunting whispers of an adolescent boy’s skin confined within a satchel, and the gory body of an “angry, ferocious” haint, the most disturbing element of Cullen Bunn’s plot to Issue Three of “Harrow County” must undoubtedly be the savage murderous attempt to kill Emmy by the girl’s own Pa; “It’s good that you’ll be gone before you realize -- what you are! Stay back! Let me finish this!” Indeed the sequence where the tearful yet perturbingly determined farmer brutally throttles his daughter before the eyes of her friend Bernice must have chilled many of this comic’s 9,189 readers to their very bones.

But whilst the somewhat unthinkable attack upon his teenage child may well have unsettled many of this horrific tale’s audience, the American noir author’s narrative also uses this distressing situation as the catalyst for the protagonist’s realisation, and swift acceptance, that although she was “not some monster”, she “can be.” This sudden loss of all innocence in the lead character is “deftly written” by the Bram Stoker Award nominee, especially when it at first appears to convince the bloodied blonde that she must find “a way to get rid of” her father “and to make sure he stayed gone… forever.”

Equally as compelling as Bunn’s narrative though, has to be the “beautifully drawn” illustration work of Tyler Crook. The former “sports video games” artist does a terrific job in captivating the eye with his brightly coloured blazing ghosts wordlessly mouthing words of warning to the startled trespassers. But it’s his incredibly emotive facial expressions found upon the figures of the living which really help tell this story of paternal betrayal and treachery. In fact the utterly astounded look in young Emmy’s eyes as her Pa mercilessly strangles her whilst all the while telling her he’s sorry, followed by the young woman’s almost malevolent look as she subsequently considers the battered and bruised farmer’s fate, is actually far more hauntingly impactive than the comic’s cliff-hanger when a sobbing naïve witch inadvertently disturbs the slumber of a four-eyed demonic creature that “would just as soon kill the girl as lay eyes upon her.”

Script: Cullen Bunn, Art and Lettering: Tyler Crook, and Pinup Art: Shane White

Harrow County #2 - Dark Horse Comics

HARROW COUNTY No. 2, June 2015

Grotesque in both its deeply dark themes as well as Tyler Crook’s graphic illustrations of mutilated corpses, Issue Two of “Harrow County” is undeniably not a comic book for the faint-hearted, and definitely lives up to Jeff Lemire’s front cover promise of the narrative being “disturbing and genuinely brilliant at its core.” In fact its doubtful many of this title’s 9,295 collectors in June 2015 didn’t feel somewhat uneasy as soon as they opened the twenty-two page periodical and spied the storyline’s opening panel disconcertingly depicting a bloodied Emmy tearing through a claustrophobic wood with the still murmuring skin of a young boy tucked tightly between her arms; “Be still I said. Or I’ll wrap you around a stone and chuck you in the creek.”

Chillingly however, the eighteen year-old girl’s fearful flight from the forest and subsequent realisation that all her thorn vine scratches have miraculously healed is only the beginning of this magazine’s journey into the truly macabre, as Cullen Bunn pens an especially disconcerting plot which involves the youth’s own father agreeing with the rest of the local townsfolk to kill his daughter on account of her “showing signs” of witchcraft. Such an unnatural discussion and decision, eerily relayed to Emmy by the ghastly yellow-eyed corpse of the skin she keeps stored in a bedroom drawer, genuinely proves a horrifyingly unsettling development. Especially when the parent, seemingly believing that his unforgivable betrayal is for the best, earnestly chides his child for running for her life on account of his having to now ‘hunt her down’ only making matters “worse.”

Somewhat interestingly though, once the teenager has flown from her father’s farm and ‘escaped’ into a nearby coppice, there is a noticeable shift in the Cape Fear-born novelist’s pacing for this “backwoods horror”. One which allows the reader to dwell upon the enormity of the frightened girl’s parental perfidy, whilst simultaneously demonstrating that just because she can cope with talking bodiless spirits and fleshless abominations, doesn’t mean the "child" can’t still become frightened of a familiar place “in the dark.”  

Conjuring up images of “ghosts and goblins haunting secluded places” and “plenty of encounters with ghostly forest denizens” within the mind’s eye, Tyler Crook’s artwork for this second instalment of Bunn’s “Countless Haints” story-arc is simply breath-taking, right down to the American cartoonist utilising twigs, rocks and a cooperative snake in order to create the title ‘Harrow County’ for the comic’s inaugural double-splash.

Script: Cullen Bunn, Art and Lettering: Tyler Crook, and Pinup Art: Joelle Jones

Harrow County #1 - Dark Horse Comics

HARROW COUNTY No. 1, June 2015

If the revoltingly gory cover illustration of this “Dark Horse Comics” publication’s second printing was not enough to convince its 11,759 strong audience in May 2015 that the Cullen Bunn narrative before them was “a series that crawls under your skin and stays there” then the novelist’s opening scene depicting a witch who “had been shot, stabbed, beaten… and finally hanged by the neck” would surely have done so. For whilst this “horror/fairy tale set in 1930’s South Carolina” occasionally touches upon the innocent upbringing of seventeen year-old Emmy on a farm, its tone is frankly “as tender as it is twisted” and rather disturbingly predominantly focuses upon all manner of grisliness and subjects taboo like “blasphemous congress with heinous things out in the woods”, the feeding of babies to “vile companions” and children “participating in strange sermons and baptisms.”

Certainly the Cape Fear-born writer’s determination to imbue his storyline with a sinisterly chilling atmosphere of “ghosts and ghouls lurking in lonely, forgotten, and unwelcoming places” means it is hard to imagine another twenty-six page periodical containing much more biblical blasphemy than Issue One of “Harrow County”. An especially impressive feat considering the American author’s script achieves all this within the space of just a dozen panels; “But even as her flesh burned away from the bone… Hester Beck trembled and hissed.”

Equally as unnerving as his boldly blatant descriptions of unholy suffering and mutilation, is Bunn’s ample ability to additionally permeate the most mundane of Emmy’s daily happenings, such as the birth of two calves in the barn, with a disconcertingly dark and sinister undertone. Indeed even the simple visit of “old man Riah” and his daughter Bernice, something the blonde-haired teenager “always welcomed” is unhappily ‘tainted’ by the suggestion that the girl’s (prejudicial) father doesn’t like them on account of the wagon traders’ brown skin.

Ultimately however this comic book makes such a lasting impression upon the mind as a result of the “simply stunning artwork” by Tyler Crook. Whether it be the dead witch’s curses babbling forth from a burning skull-like face as the flesh literally bubbles and melts away, or the breathing sack of skin groaning at Emmy through “torn lips” from deep within the wood’s thorn bush, “the regular artist on B.P.R.D.” packs his water coloured pictures with a discomfiting abundance of lifelike detail and they are 'as beautiful as they are bloody.'

The regular cover art of "HARROW COUNTY" No. 1 by Tyler Crook