EPISODE 11: NIGHTMARE CITY - HAITI

Hey, does anyone remember that bombastic remake of Umberto Lenzi’s NIGHTMARE CITY?  You remember, don’t you?  A hoard of starving undead threatening to take over the world with only the stoic might of LOU FERRIGNO (The Incredible Hulk), NOAH HATHAWAY (Neverending Story) and JUDITH O’DEA (Night of the Living Dead) to stop them? Throw in the Director of Photography DEAN CUNDEY (John Carpenter’s Halloween, Escape from New York) and Director TOM “Sex Machine” SAVINI (SFX - Dawn of the Dead, Friday the 13th, Creepshow)! Sill not ringing any bells??

If the answer was a resounding “NO”, you’re in good company ‘cause neither did we, or the rest of the universe. And it’s a shame too, because among the lower budgeted indie films that are produced, this one had an inspired conceit and a bullseye of a pop culture cast and crew ta’ boot! This BLOOD CLOT episode serves as a cautionary tale about how a movie is never officially greenlit unless you’re actually seeing it on the silver screen (or streaming service). So what was the fate of this feature film and our involvement with it?

Buckle up kids, we’re going for a ride.

Before we begin I would like to state that the information expressed in this article is for journalistic purposes only. The opinions expressed in this article are those of Derek Rook and may not be otherwise associated with the views and/or opinions of Rough House Publishing, LLC and/or staff. All information associated with the film project “Nightmare City” is sourced from publicly released promotional articles. All artwork, photography and/or video clips are property of their respected copyright holders and are intended for review purposes only. No infringement is intended.

So the paint was barely dry on the brick shithouse that was yet to be known as ROUGH HOUSE PUBLISHING LLC, and already we’re hopping on planes to Chicago and driving to New York to fortify publishing deals with our favorite independent publishers, and bringing their defunct properties, THE DEAD and GORE SHRIEK back to bloody life.

During this time, I had worked on some art pages that would eventually end up as the impetus for our “HOSPICE” story in GORE SHRIEK® RESURRECTUS VOLUME ONE.  I had posted them online in color (the published work ended up in black & white) and thus caught the eye of a producer working for the company that was spearheading the remake and asked me if we were interested in producing and publishing a comic book that would serve as the PREQUEL to the film, and would effectively explain how the zombie outbreak began before leading right into the film. Hmm, lemme think about this…

UM, …FUCK YEAH WE DO!

And just like that, we were off to the races! The prequel book would eventually be titled, NIGHTMARE CITY - HAITI and it took zero time for us to slate this in as our third and most ambitious effort to date.

For the uninitiated, the original movie NIGHTMARE CITY (AKA - CITY OF THE WALKING DEAD) was part of a massive, but relatively short lived onslaught of Italian zombie/cannibal films that followed in the shambling footsteps of George A. Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD upon its stateside release in 1978.  Eventually the craze would return to the grave for about two decades (although you’d never know it now), but not before delivering to us, some of the most wacky-ass, over-the-top brand of low-budget exploitation that only the Italians would have the brass balls and audacity to commit to celluloid. 

The plot was simple enough:

A rogue military plane makes an emergency landing after flying through some type of nuclear radiation with no one able to be contacted aboard.  News of this planes landing catches the attention of air traffic control, the police, the military and local news reporter, DEAN MILLER, played in painful rigidity by Mexican actor, HUGO STIGLITZ, doing his very best impression of a body snatcher from space doing an impression of Ron Burgundy.

The plane doors finally open and a flood of zombified humans emerge to wreak havoc across the countryside.  The movie even has a Shyamalan-style twist ending that suggests that the horrors of the film were all just a horrible Stiglitz nightmare ….OR IS IT?!!!

Ironically, the original NIGHTMARE CITY has MUCH more in common with 28 DAYS LATER than the garden variety zombie fare, despite being released a full 22 years earlier.  The “zombies” were less living dead and more “infected” humans decomposing from being dosed in toxic radiation and needing fresh BLOOD to regenerate their dying cells …and they RAN like hell! These zany fuckers do just about anything to get a splash of warm red viscera, including cutting women’s areolas off  and “breastfeeding” like bosses, to wielding garden tools, axes, scalpels, knives, fire pokers and even guns, all while looking like they jumped out of a 1970’s Sears Fall Catalog after being blasted in the face with horse shit.

2014 arrived and it’s announced that an Indiegogo campaign has been launched to raise money for the remake with original Director, Umberto Lenzi attached as Associate Producer, to deliver the goods in a much more traditional “Romero Style” zombie fashion with it’s own feel. The campaign would go on to raise $138,857 dollars over several months with several donation levels, incentives and stretch goals, that continued to raise the bar, even so far as to offer higher level donors an opportunity to act in the feature film itself. HEY NOW!!!

They say that art imitates life and what more inspiration does one need for a tale like this than a gnarly flesh eating virus that threatened to take over the world? At this same time in history, there was an actual Ebola virus outbreak that eventually killed over 30,000 people and shook the population of West Africa to its very foundation. As the virus furiously spread throughout Haiti and surrounding areas, there was a mounting fear that we were facing what could become a global pandemic (how interesting of what pandemic would come six years later).

Mike “Corpse Monger” Wasion, Rough House’s then resident Scribe, crafted what we thought would be the perfect jumping off point for our woe-ridden tale.

Our pitch went something like this:

“In a small village in Haiti, a new strain of the Ebola virus had taken hold and was rapidly wiping out the local population.  The virus had mutated and become impervious to any forms of treatment or cure.  With the virus aggressively claiming victims at wholesale, the fear of an airborne strain was slowly becoming a reality.

A military quarantine was erected along the boarders of the isle and in desperation, a team of doctors were assembled from around the globe specializing in unorthodox experimental medicine.  The idea here was that we would subtly pay homage to the MAD doctor’s of Italian Zombie cinema by naming them DR. MENARD (Zombi2), DR. OBERTO (Zombie Holocaust/Dr. Butcher MD) and DR. BARRETT (Hell of the Living Dead/Night of the Zombies).  Italian Cinematic Horror Universe anyone?

The Doctor’s Three, develop a serum that when injected into the infected patient, decreases the heart rate slowly to the point of essentially “killing” them, at least long enough for the Ebola strain to die without a living host.  The serum then infuses the cells with a self-sustaining antibody that effectively “kickstarts” the patient back to life, assuredly virus free. 

At first the experimental drug seems to be a success, but like any good dystopian terror tale, things don’t stay very awesome for very long, and eventually the patients come back to life, but not as originally intended.  Hell ensues, and it becomes an all-out war between the living and the living dead as the military desperately fight to maintain the perimeter and eliminate the threat before the dead flood into neighboring villages, and eventually the planet.

End Pitch.

Mike had a very particular “death-cycle” designed for this particular brand of Zombie, beginning as traditional living rotted corpses, but then mutating in stages into walking versions of the Ebola virus itself.  So without further ado, here’s the CORPSE MONGER himself, and what he had to say of his experience with writing the treatment for the fated, NIGHTMARE CITY – HAITI:

 “Alright, so...the thing I remember most from my ill-fated time in the NCH salt mines, was my self-imposed mandate of reinventing the zombie, and without supernatural means at that. So how exactly was I to do that, whilst ALSO making it seem ‘CLASSIC’?  Always a tall order.  I had a visual hook in my head that kind of kicked off all the ideas and tied it all together like the dropping of so many fetid dominoes.

That hook - an immediate knee-jerk memory of ONE zombie in particular from the original NIGHTMARE CITY, a crusty, pan-blackened ghoul who resembled nothing so much as a bug-eyed burnt marshmallow in a tailored suit.  I thought, ‘This fucker looks like a straight up blood blister after Sunday services.’ “

 “So I thought alright...let's push that to the Nth degree...how far can I take that look/idea? And from THERE, my mind instantly went to the final form of BRUCE WILLIS from the GRINDHOUSE film’s (superior segment- sorry, QT) PLANET TERROR (which on its own could have been a remake of Nightmare City).  A postulate abomination so over-the-top, that it seemed like a boss monster from a video game.  But there were also shades of the vampire, with all the blood drinking, the slasher, with all the stabbing, and even the CLASSIC zombie, with our shift to Haiti...so how in the ACTUAL HELL do I blend such dissonant yet vitally important motifs? “

 “Welp, …our zombies had to CHANGE, like ever-worsening stages of a beyond-terminal illness. So I thought, they'd start off as wide-eyed, weapon-wielding, blood-guzzling killers ...then devolve into brain-addled, throat-ripping, flat-lined, undead killers ...and finally, arrive at a living embodiment of the disease itself, barely humanoid berserkers, and more tumor than human. These creatures could kill not only with brutality, but also by proximity. Fucked no matter what.”

 “I pitched all of this, only to be met with feverish enthusiasm from Derek...and general confusion from the Powers-That-Be. We asked for specifics as to what to change, or do differently...and were met with ‘directives’ vaguer than the MPAA handing notes on HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER.”

 “It simply was not to be.”

In many ways, Mike was dead on. Our pitch was in radical contrast to the film that I think they were trying to make, which sounded much closer in tone to the Ford Brothers’ film, THE DEAD (2010) and not to be confused with the comic book of the same name by Arrow Comics. Eventually though, …the wheels of that puss fueled, Ebola-ridden husk were about to rot right the fuck off …and seemingly, no one survived the crash.

It’s now almost a decade later. The production companies Facebook page hasn’t been updated since 2016. The companies website is now defunct. That Indiegogo campaign has long since closed and the once flourishing news has yielded to radio silence. Many a financial backer was left with unanswered questions and empty pockets with nothing to show for it. “Production Hell” is NOT always a death sentence for would-be films, but it does have it’s own department on the Hollywood walk of shame.

In retrospect, NIGHTMARE CITY - HAITI, became the first “dead body” of a project to lay at our then, unscathed foundation. This happens more often than documented (especially with licensed IP’s) and is generally accepted as the price of doing business. Thicker skins have prevailed.

So what ever became of those "ULTRA-ZOMBIES" we planned to unleash?  I don't think they're quite done feeding quite yet. ROUGH HOUSE PUBLISHING has a strict policy that absolutely NOTHING awesome will remain on the cutting room floor, so keep watching the trash cans, kids. We CAN say that it was an honor having been asked to the party in the first place and if the ghouls in golden corduroy rear their stove-topped, scabby faces again, we’ll be ready to give THE ROUGHIANS something to dismember!

Until the next BLOOD CLOT, don’t forget to keep your cardigan tucked into your plaid, bell bottomed pants! It’s going to be a cold one this season.

D. Rook

06DEC2023

The great Umberto Lenzi passed away on Thursday October 19th 2017 at the age of 86.

EPISODE 10: HALLOWEEN RETURNS TO HADDONFIELD (2003/Xmachina)

HAPPY HALLOWEEN roughians, and welcome to what will be the oddest BLOOD CLOT retrospective for arguably THE MOST SCARCE comic book (or any Halloween movie franchise collectable) in existence.

Nowadays it feels like there’s more merchandise associated with Michael Myers than the band Kiss (although I don’t think they’ve made a Myers Casket quite yet. However, there’s just about anything else that that your blackest eyes could desire including action figures, Halloween costumes, t-shirts, snow globes, Pop figures, plushies, highway signs, comforters, young adult novels and COMIC BOOKS! CHAOS! Comics did a run back in the early 2000’s, followed by a string of books written by the talented and dedicated Stef Hutchinson a few years later through Devil’s Due Publishing and others. But among every batch of glorious, gory franchise goodies lies a black sheep (he had the blackest sheep, the devil’s sheep) that comes along under the cloak of darkness….a darkness so incredibly pitch, that most fans, can never even fucking see it.

Lucky for all of us, the internet has spent countless research hours tracking down and reviewing not one, but all of these books in detail, and these fine folks at SCREAMING SOUP! have outdone themselves in that regard, …including an impressive in depth (and honest) review of the book were here to deconstruct, HALLOWEEN RETURNS TO HADDONFIELD. If you’ve got 48 minutes and 15 seconds to kill, treat yourself to the entire thing, but if you are aching to find out all there is to know about THIS tricky publication, feel free to jump ahead to the 22:03 minute mark and pregame with us here!

So you’ve often heard me say that ROUGH HOUSE is not my first romp into publishing comics (and other collectables).  If we go back a little over two decades now, you’d have seen that there were extremely few outlaw comic book publishers doing what would be considered “the Lords work”.  For those of you who remember, there was BLACKEST HEART MEDIA (who would later go on to helm the famed EIBON PRESS) and it was from a fateful series of events that I got involved with their graphic novel production of Lucio Fulci’s ZOMBIE.  And even though this was not my first time as a published artist, it was one of the books I became known for to this day.

Due to a series of issues (that I was not directly involved with) the writer and I decided to branch off from Blackest Heart and start our own indie publishing imprint with the purposely misspelled title, XMACHINA (derived from the Latin phrase “Deus Ex Machina”, meaning “God from the machine”.)

Through Xmachina, we published a PHANTASM sequel comic book along with a reprint of the original PHANTASM movie pocket novel, both of which were sanctioned by original Director Don Coscarelli.  Then in short order, we printed our first issue of THE GATES OF HELL (a radically different version of what would come later courtesy of Eibon Press).

Things were ramping up extremely fast and in those days. It didn’t take long for one project to give opportunities directly to another.  Among properties we “almost” locked down were George A. Romero’s DAY OF THE DEAD and BUBBA-HOTEP, both of which we produced artwork for, but ultimately they fell through.  Point being, the phone was ringing and it was a glorious time.  Even though we were two kids just figuring it all out, there was excitement in the air, none the less.

Of those aforementioned phone calls, I received one around midnight my time in late summer of 2003 (The call came from California) and it was a person who was the liaison for Joe Wolfe, one of the financiers for the original JOHN CARPENTER’S HALLOWEEN.  Due to the crazy buzz Xmachina had generated through shameless self-promotion (with more than a little help from FANGORIA magazine) this person was vehemently interested in having us producing a new Halloween comic book series.  The catch was, we had to produce (and be on the hook for) 40 thousand copies regardless of sales.  I remember trying to give them a quick lesson on the comic book solicitation process but they weren’t having it.  It was very much a “do or don’t” proposition.  After some time to think it over, we ultimately declined, BUT still wanted to negotiate something for their upcoming HALLOWEEN RETURNS TO HADDONFIELD 25th ANNIVERSARY CONVENTION (a title they would ultimately shorten as the con went forward in the years ahead), a convention this person on the phone was also a partner of producing and promoting.

 Ultimately, we agreed that Xmachina would produce their first convention magazine, appropriately titled “HALLOWEEN RETURNS TO HADONFIELD Official Souvenir Magazine”, to be sold exclusively at the convention.  It was the first Michael Myers convention of its kind and it was going to take place at the original filming location of Pasadena California.  The one caveat that I slipped in to the deal was that I could create a Halloween comic book story within the pages of the magazine itself, as I was a GIANT Halloween fan at that time and even though we weren’t going to be doing a Halloween comic book proper, I wasn’t too proud to back door one into the convention magazine.

We as Xmachina only had basically two (2) months to produce the entire magazine, get it printed, and have it convention ready, and with that impossible deadline, we produced a “magazine” (basically a comic with loads of other stuff inside) that included:

• An 13 page original Michael Myers story originally titled “Halloween – Demystifying the Devil” but was later changed to “Halloween – Retribution and Descent”.  I wrote the original script and my writing/publishing partner heavily reworked it from the source material into something more formidable for a comic book type story.  Derek Rook, Stephen Romano, Mike Flippin, Ricardo Bernardini.

• A six (6) song soundtrack CD was written and composed that included a soundtrack to the comic book portion of the magazine, an original song about Michael, Laurie and Judith, a “sequel” soundtrack song to Escape from New York titled, “After the Escape” and reworking’s of Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead and Near Dark.  Stephen Romano, Rock Romano, Christian Lee Dukes.

• A map of Haddonfield with all the key locations from all eight (8) films (at that time). Jim Means.

• Halloween Alumni Yearbook.

• Halloween Movie Trivia.

• Rare Production photos (that can be seen everywhere on the internet now).

• Donald Pleasence Remembrance Page, with quotes from – John Carpenter, Charles Cyphers, Kathleen Kinmont, Danielle Harris and more.

The magazine was highly ambitious but with the help of several talented and willing participants, we were able to pull off a very handsome and attractive chunk of pulp.

For those who don’t own a copy (and/or have never read it) the big question asked by fans is …”What’s the Michael Myers comic book story all about?”

Basically our original story, HALLOWEEN – DEMYSTIFYING THE DEVIL was of the conceit that the Halloween movies were based on a true story as told by Dr. Samuel Loomis (from his autobiography), the doctor who treated, and later hunted down Michael Myers.  The movies all exist, but most are fabricated sequels and not accurate to specific key incidents. What was considered “real” and what was “fabricated” was left somewhat ambiguous, but certain elements, both realistic and supernatural, exist in our “true” story.

Still confused?  No worries, so am fuckin’ I.  I can’t tell you what I’d rather do than write my way out of eight (8) movies that already had three (3) split timelines by the time I got to it.  Somewhere out there is a crucifix with Daniel Farrands stapled to it, and I’m going to hang it over my bed one day as his passion truly did not go unpunished.

Alas, we’re going to go through it for the very first time, but basically what you need to know is that Dr. Loomis is at the end of his life.  His autobiography has long since come out and the movies have all been made.  However, the real Michael Myers is still very much alive and very much a threat, and Loomis knows more than most as to when and why Michael will strike next.  Due to a series of wrongful death lawsuits from the victims against the town of Haddonfield, a new district attorney (Daniel Atkins) has been appointed to the case and considers Loomis to be the real threat.  He will learn differently, but his first order of business is to discredit Loomis by any means possible.

So let’s start off with a (fake review) of Dr. Loomis’ book and I’ll unpack the rest of this nest of hornets the best I can as we move our way through the heavily troubled story of HALLOWEEN – DEMYSTIFYING THE DEVIL!

Demystifying the Devil

Author: Dr. Samuel J. Loomis

Type: Non-Fiction

Sub-Type - Autobiography/Memoir

Published: September 23rd 1994

Publisher: Compass International Press

 Review: Published in the New York Times; October 31st 1994

“Perhaps once in a journalist’s career are they plucked from the bullpen of the mundane to venture out and uncover what critics are referring to as the best Roman Polanski film never filmed. Speaking of, the film rights for this #1 best seller five weeks running has already been sold for an unprecedented $400,000,000 so we may be finding out as early as next year if Hollywood turns out the next great American classic.

In this case we’re referring to the autobiography, “Demystifying the Devil”, an unwavering memoir of a man’s journey into the heart of darkness, mental illness, retribution and descent. 

For those uninitiated with the author’s pedigree, Dr. Samuel Loomis, was the psychiatrist assigned to Michael A. Myers, committed at the age of six, after stabbing his older sister with a kitchen knife on Halloween night.  While under Loomis’ care, Myers had two highly-publicized escapes which resulted in multiple murders, several law suits and the derailment of both Loomis’ career and ultimately, his sanity. 

The first third of this narrative briskly traverses through the formative years in Loomis’ life, from his youthful upbringing during the great depression to joining the British Armed Forces as a medic during World War II.  We are captured in a through line of faith overcoming adversity to the point where you can almost smell the lead permeating off of the Norman Rockwell-eque  tapestry being painted for us here in these pages.

I was particularly taken with the story of how Loomis met his wife Angela in medical school, and leading to the birth of their first and only child Benjamin in 1957.  The events that transpire in the years to come makes this set up all the more tragic.  But even while untwining this tale of woe, Dr. Loomis never misses that flair for the dramatic.

For the first 150 pages, it becomes very easy to forget what type of story we are reading, but make no mistake. This is a cautionary tale of just how bleak and dark the book ultimately becomes.  Not since “Searching for Mr. Goodbar”, which was mercifully fictional, have I read something that left me with a pit of despair so large.

Then much like the narrative itself, we enter a tonal shift readers may not likely recover from.  Like a hurricane that comes without warning, destroying everything in its path, enters Michael Myers.  The stories of Myers’ exploits are well documented, but even for a comparatively mild middle-American tragedy, Loomis stands firm in the center of Myers’ shadow until all he too can see is total darkness.  And without an alternate point of view, in darkness we all drown.  Darkness that accuses his colleagues of conspiring with a killer, darkness that forces his wife and child to flee without warning, darkness witnessed through the “blackest eyes, the devils eyes”.  That’s a direct quote, people.

And this all happens before Myers escapes and returns to Haddonfield in 1978.

As gripping as this was to read, there were times I felt Loomis’ repetitive rants were testing my ability to soldier on.   It bears to question if he himself is aware of how detached his mind wanders as the theories of Myers’ murdering spirit become more metaphysical than medical.  There is a sad point in the climaxing pages where we have to respectfully dismiss ourselves from the hand we’ve been asked to hold.  Our narrator is well past unreliable, and although still entertaining, it almost feels like we are condescending mental illness, and this journalist can’t help but feel a little filthy by exploiting a sick man …who’s exploited a sick man.

With so much emphasis on Michael Myers as “the embodiment of evil”…all we have left to ponder is the erosion of the wonderful opening chapters that brought us here.  Much like the real life of Dr. Samuel Loomis, the epilogue of “Demystifying the Devil” suggests that Loomis may have left out one of the most truly heart-wrenching casualties in the mythos of Michael Myers …that causality being himself.”

The Halloween Movie Timeline in our story:

(Note - All the movies were based, in part, from the stories, theories and research as presented in the autobiography, “Demystifying the Devil”, written by Dr. Samuel Loomis.)

John Carpenter’s Halloween (1995) – This is the first movie based on the true story of Sam Loomis and Laurie Strode, one of the only two living victims of Michael Myers.  The movie suggests that everything you see actually happened. When Loomis’ book was released, the movie rights were sold as well.  Many partially to completely unrelated sequels followed.

Halloween II (1996) – Is the fictionalized sequel to the movie “Halloween”. A story was built around the last 3rd of Loomis’ book, which chronicled how Michael followed Laurie to the hospital where she was treated and how Loomis attempted to kill both himself and Myers in an explosion.  Both survived but were critically injured. The movie depicted their “deaths” and for a time, ended the series.

Halloween III (1997) – Is a fictionalized self-contained story based around the manufacturer responsible for creating and selling the mask Michael wore on his original killing spree.  The company, Silver Shamrock, was suspiciously tied to a series of deaths related to their products, but the company was abandoned upon investigation.  Several shipments of masks were “displaced” and have re-surfaced in retail stores sporadically around the country in the years that followed the incident.

Halloween 4 (1998) – Loosely based on Michael’s 2nd escape and murder spree in Haddonfield.  It was theorized in Loomis’ book that Laurie Strode was Michael’s biological sister, and that in her “death”, Michael would attack her daughter, Jamie Lloyd.  After the events of that night, and the questionable “disappearance” of Michael, Jamie began displaying violent behavior, stabbing her step-mother before being arrested.

Halloween 5 (1999) – Nothing in this sequel is based on the real-life events that took place in Haddonfield the year prior.  In reality, Jamie Lloyd was institutionalized into a juvenile rehabilitation facility by reason of temporary-insanity. She remained there until her 18th birthday and was released.  Her current whereabouts are unknown.

Halloween 6 (2000) – A fictionalized sequel based on a very small chapter in Loomis’ book where his research lead him to believe that the origins of Michael’s evil may have begun with a druid cult.  This was a delusion that carried over into Loomis’ later years when he attempted suicide by slicing his wrist insisting that he was removing the “mark of Thorn”. This mark was never discovered and deemed all part of Loomis’ increasing psychosis.

Halloween 7 (2001) – A sequel of the fictional scenario where Laurie Strode returned to face Michael Myers one “last” time.  The failing Halloween movie series benefitted from the return of the original film actress to portray Laurie Strode, Jamie Lee Curtis.  The real Laurie Strode left Haddonfield soon after the original incident and is now presumed dead.

Halloween 8 (2002) – The last movie sequel, completely fictionalized and unrelated to the original incident.  At this point, Loomis’ book was completely purged from, and no connective tissue used to helm this film. Among fans of this film series, the movie is considered to be a farcical representation of the source material and is largely maligned by fans. As a result, this remains the last will and testament to a failed franchise.

Ok!  Now that you’ve been fed this heaping exposition dump, scroll below this paragraph to view the actual pages of the story as they were originally presented in HALLOWEEN RETURNS TO HADDONFIELD Official Souvenir Magazine. Use the scroll arrows to advance the pages (there’s 15 all together) and prepare to read perhaps the most peculiar Michael Myers story never realised:

Alright did you actually use the scroll arrows or did you just stare at the contents page for 15 minutes and tell me that you did? Well for those now finally initiated, go ahead and read on to see what was in store if in fact this story was allowed to continue until the end.

THE STORY AFTER THE STORY:

Haddonfield, Illinois October 31st, 2003 Night:

Michael Myers is back!  As night falls, Michael begins his murderous killing spree, going door to door without remorse and with reckless abandon.  This time he doesn’t have a mission. He’s there to kill.  Indiscriminately. No one knows he is there, and no one is there to stop him, except….Reverend Jack Sayer.  Sayer is on the hunt for evil itself and there is an exchange between the two, but Sayer is no match for Michael and he is made to be the “example” for the people of Haddonfield to find in the morning, and they do.  Sayer is found in a pumpkin patch, strung up like a scarecrow, his body hallowed out and stuffed with hey.

Police arrive far too late, and with them is Dan Atkins to witness the bloody aftermath.

November 1st, 2003 Samhain 11:45pm

Elysium Fields Rest Home

Atkins arrives to see Loomis once again, only this time, his arrogance has been replaced with despair.  He needs to see Loomis right away but is informed that Loomis has entered the Hospice wing and is not expected to live through the night.

Atkins insists and is finally allowed to see Loomis one last time.  Loomis is in a hospital bed, there is no one else there.  Atkins is the only visitor.  Atkins admits to Loomis that he was right all along and that all he wanted was to save those people in Haddonfield.  He also admits that the man in the cell at Ridgemont was NOT Michael, but instead another violent mental patient who let Michael out. But how?  Atkins is a mess.  He asks Loomis if he knows how to stop Michael for good.  Loomis tells Atkins that Michael’s killing spree was a message and Atkins is the messenger. 

Loomis tells Atkins that his curse has ALWAYS been to ENDURE Michael’s wrath as punishment for getting to close to him.  For trying to figure him out.  A reminder of how insignificant Loomis’ influence has always been. To crush his soul.  “As you can see, hehe, …he won.”, admits Loomis.  “Everything you need to stop him is there”, and points to the book.  “Find the little girl before next Halloween. His essence is still inside her.  He lives through her.”  Atkins thanks Loomis and takes the book.  He says his final goodbyes and goes to leave.  Loomis grabs his wrist suddenly and states one last cryptic message, “Please, …don’t leave me here unarmed.”  Atkins gives Loomis his revolver to which Loomis replies, “It’s your game now, Mr. Atkins.” As he says it, Loomis lets go of Dan’s wrist.  “Thank you Sam.” And with that final exchange, Atkins leaves and Sam is all alone.  Sam looks at his right wrist.  The mark of Thorn is no longer there.

Loomis raises the revolver to his temple as a tear rolls down his cheek.  As Loomis prepares to pull the trigger, Michael appears out of the darkness with a scalpel in hand, slowly approaching the bed.  Sam stares back at Michael with disgust and pauses to assess how impossible the situation has become for him.  Sam begins falling into cardiac arrest, Michael raises the scalpel to strike and Sam begins to pull the trigger on the revolver..

At the very last second, Loomis points the gun at Michael’s masked face. “It’s time, …Michael.” And pulls the trigger.

BOOM!

CUT TO BLACK

The story cuts to a montage of the changing of the seasons, and with it we see Atkins reading Loomis’ book, taking notes, looking more grizzled and becoming more savvy to what has driven Michael this entire time.  Of the many investigative missions Atkins goes on, one is into the origins of Silver Shamrock, a company that was believed to be involved in foul play regarding the nature of five (5) mask prototypes that when used in conjunction with a radio wave signal broadcasted through electronic devices, caused harm to the wearer.  Of the five masks were The Witch, The Pumpkin, The Skull, The Clown and The Shape.  The last of which was the mask Michael chose to steal on his original rampage.

Alas, the plot details were never fully fleshed out into an actual script, but I had an outline of plot points and story beats that I wanted to take place through the story.  For instance:

• New reveal of Michael.  Mask blown apart on one side, revealing skeletal teeth.

• Dan Atkins begins scratching his wrist which eventually reveals the mark of thorn.

• Atkins learns that Michaels mask (manufactured by Silver Shamrock) keeps him from dying of his wounds, hence why he always wears it.  This is a byproduct of the mask’s programming, but not its main function.

• Atkins tracks down Jamie Lloyd, now 25 and learns that as long as she’s alive, Michael is alive. The mask no longer is needed. She’s been surviving in a halfway house because Laurie Strode (who did in fact fake her own death) has been sending care packages.

• Laurie, Jamie and Dan eventually team up.

• Atkins dies in a battle with Michael in the third act.

• A struggle ensues where Jamie is falling prey to the curse once again.  Michael is in pursuit of Laurie who is trying to activate the original Silver Shamrock signal from a cable tower. Michael catches up and there is a struggle.  In the end, Laurie switches the power on and seemingly nothing happens.  Laurie then rushes Michael and they both fall from the tower.  Laurie hits the bottom and is fatally wounded.  Michael returns to his feet, his ankle is broken but he still is going for Jamie. Jamie has some fight in her but ultimately she is losing to Michael.

• In the end, the signal finally plays the Silver Shamrock recording and Michaels head explodes with snakes, maggots, bugs and other foul vermin, killing him permanently.

• Jamie’s curse is lifted in the wake of Michael’s death. Jamie has an exchange with Laurie right before she dies.  Mother and daughter reconcile.

• Last scene.  Its Winter.  In a house somewhere in a faraway neighborhood, a family celebrates Christmas.  Through the picture window from the outside, we can see a big family inside enjoying the holiday and gift exchange. Suddenly they hear the doorbell ring and a middle aged man answers.  No one is outside.  There is a gift wrapped on the doorstep, in the shape of a book.  The man picks it up and takes one last look around.  From the inside a woman comes to the door, “Hey honey, whatya got there?.”  “Looks like a secret Santa gift.”  From inside the house an older woman shouts, “Benjamin, close that door, you’re letting the heat out.”  “Yes mom”, he says as he smiles at his wife. They close the door.  From further away, Jamie looks on. She takes it all in one last time, then walks away into the snowy night. THE END.

And that was, my friends, the basic premise and plot for Halloween – Retribution and Descent, for better or for worse. A sincere THANK YOU for sticking with it.

When I say this was a herculean effort on all parts to make this book happen, I’m not even kidding.  I was literally inking my last page of art in the car, on my way to the nearest FedEx hub.  Stephen Romano was literally living in a recording studio for a month while trying to provide art direction for the book at the same time.  The colorist had to stop before he was 100% finished because we had to send the files to China for printing.  And probably the most nerve wracking of all was that the entire shipment of 3,000 books (even though it said 2,000 copies on the back cover) had to be shipped from the printer in China, directly to the Xmachina booth at the Pasadena Convention Center floor, ONE DAY before Steve and I arrived by plane to attend the convention.  We didn’t even know for sure if the books would be waiting for us when we arrived, OR how they would look.  FUCK!

The show went off “OK” for a first time convention.  It had the CHILLER THATRE Convention happening the very same weekend on the East coast, and there were some monumental wildfires happening all over the area which prevented many of the guests from being able to attend.  There was however one of the best ensembles of Halloween cast members from any of the Halloween conventions that occurred since.  Almost everyone was there, and happy, healthy and alive to boot.  Some friends came in from California and Las Vegas and the weekend went underway.

Historically, our HALLOWEEN RETURNS TO HADDONFIELD book sold relatively well at the convention, but when you have 3,000 books to sell in one weekend, the sales seemed sizably smaller by comparison.  What didn’t help was that once the convention was over, we had no other way to sell the book.  For a small amount of time, it was sold on the Halloweenmovies website, but that deal quickly went away, leaving us with boxes of books to wipe our collective asses with. 

It wasn’t until around 2007 when they announced that the Halloween series was being rebooted by Rob Zombie that I received a call from a friend who promptly told me that our book was selling at above $200 bucks on ebay and that I should partake in the sales considering we didn’t make a dime off the book when it originally came out.

The years that followed I’d released small batches of books at conventions and online, as “Special Editions”, with a brand new slip cover, signed and numbered and usually with an original sketch to make it a special purchase for fans.  I would sell them at a lower price than the secondary market and guaranteed them to be brand new (versus a used copy that everyone else was selling).

This Halloween story was meant to be the DARK KNIGHT RETURNS of the HALLOWEEN series, which took into account every official storyline, every movie and ultimately I created a world where they could all co-exist in some fashion or form.  The idea was to build interest among Michael Myers fans, enough for us to be allowed to create our “Ultimate” Halloween story. 

Yeah, that never happened.

Incidentally, HALLOWEEN RETURNS TO HADDONFIELD was the last book that Xmachina ever published.  Soon after, the core crew disbanded and went on to different projects, to live different lives and the company itself went belly up.  I quit the publishing/Illustration industry all together, and for almost a decade, I dedicated myself to Corporate Security Management where I stayed until returning to the biz in 2010.  But that’s another story.

Even though the road to this books creation was tumultuous and ultimately ill received, there’s no denying that in spite of the big swing and miss, that in the end, a couple of guys with a LOT of talent and a TINY publishing company was fortunate enough to have the franchise holders calling us, …not the other way around. 

Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t, kids.  Because the truth is, “You Can’t.”  So do it anyway and let the naysayers struggle to unfold your haphazardly put together piece of middle finger origami. 

HAPPY HALLOWEEN one and all! 

See you in the not-so-funny books!

D. Rook 31OCT2023

EPISODE 9: ALICE COOPER (1979/MARVEL PREMIERE #50)

Before we get into the Comic book you all showed up for, we have to address the album that all of this clinical insanity was tied into.  For those blissfully unaware, “The Alice Cooper Group” was a band before it was a solo act, and all of it was predicated on the lead singer, Vincent Damon Furnier, who shared the namesake of the band as his stage name, “Alice Cooper”.

When the band broke up shortly after the lackluster release of the album, “Muscle of Love” …Vincent Furnier changed his name legally to ALICE COOPER and from then on, became a one man show…buuuut not really.  There were an insane amount of musicians (most notably the great DICK WAGNER), songwriters, producers (most notably the great BOD EZRIN), and only one manager, (the legendary SHEP GORDON) who heavily contributed to the continued success of Alice Cooper, who’s boisterous personality, quick-whit, gravelly voice , gallows humor and vaudevillian stage show, projected him into a household name status by the mid-1970’s. “Alice goes Hollywood” era, as I say.

But like many musicians of the era (many of whom died in the 27 Club), Alice struggled with his own demons, mostly in the form of alcohol.  By 1977, his new wife, SHERYL GODDARD, who was a dancer in his live performances, was already feeling the strains of sharing a life with an addict. As a result, Alice committed himself to the Cornell Mental Institution in New York to “Dry out”, and it was during his month-long stay at the institution that the seeds were sewn for the concept album, FROM THE INSIDE.

There was a big marketing push for FROM THE INSIDE (released on Nov. 17, 1978) and in usual fashion, the record album itself had “special features” to boot.  This one had Alice’s face juxtaposed over a set of double institutional doors, that when opened, revealed a triple gatefold interior, introducing us to the many characters that appear in the songs lyrics.  In the picture, there is a door labeled “The Quiet Room” that when opened, revealed Alice Cooper himself, sedate and looking uncharacteristically pensive.   On the back cover of the record, doors opened up to reveal Alice and his merry band of inmates, running out with their “Release” papers waving away! 

Shortly after, MARVEL COMICS would introduce us to the very first comic book incarnation of ALICE COOPER back when they would dare to do such a thing (being the super cool, un-corporate, independent publishing  company that they once were…hard to believe now, I know). And with it, taking on subjects of mental illness (duh), substance abuse, murder, shellshock, sexual misconduct (and innuendo) and somehow delivering it in a package of slapstick humor that would harken back to the type of situation comedy you would get from episodic television of the era….and not offend a damn soul in the process.  I was actually offended that they were NOT offended that I was NOT offended.

But I digress…

MARVEL PREMIERE #50 FEATURING ALICE COOPER WAS BORN (FEET FIRST, …OUCH!) Released 1979!

The story set up is a direct tie in to the lyrical content and themes of the album itself with the subtitle, STAN LEE PRESENTS: ALICE COOPER (written in the cool Welcome to my Nightmare Era logo) FROM THE INSIDE.  There’s something that just made me giddy as fuck seeing Stan Lee introduce such a story!

Immediately we are treated to Alice goofily attempting to escape from the insane asylum before getting caught red-handed by the ominous (and extremely sexy) NURSE ROSETTA.  Quickly we are serenaded by Alice’s one-liners and antics that fool absolutely no one.  Alice is quickly apprehended by a coupla’ thug orderlies and lead by the Nurse Ratched-Like  Rosetta,  as they drag Alice kicking and screaming to the dreaded “QUIET ROOM”.  Along the way, we are introduced to some of the other asylum (and album) alumni including JACKKNIFE JOHNNY, a shell shocked Vietnam veteran who does his best to stop the apprehension with a red plastic machine gun, and the questionable DR. FINGEROTH who in addition to being the shadiest doctor this side of Dr. Giggles, sports the most gigantic Art Garfunkel afro ta’ boot.

Alice is harshly deposited on The Quiet Room floor and locked in for good measure.  At this point he breaks the fourth wall and talks to us, dear readers, about how he got into this SERIOUS pickle in the first place.  Aaaand here we….GO!

As it were, Alice was getting “Coop’ed Out” from the perils from the road (much played down from the actual reasons associated with severe alcoholism) and checked himself into a clinic to “Dry up” (ahem).  Alice has the unfortunate luck of sitting himself next to” a certified paranoid schizo with a radial tire fetish” by the name of ALEX Cooper, and in the name of egregious mistaken identity, the cops show up (looking strangely like Fred Gwynne and Joe Ross from Car 54, Where are you?) and mistakenly apprehend ALICE Cooper instead (because of course they did).

Once taken to the insane asylum, Alice is scrubbed down (with Namor as a shower buddy), subject to electro shock therapy, forced into ice water baths, MORE electro shock therapy (all of which have in real life been deemed cruel and unusual, and criminal by medical standards) before having his hair involuntarily cut short, all in attempts to make him look and behave “normally”. 

Alice’s pet boa constrictor is a character in this story, and is even given the name VERONICA, which is a retcon from one of the characters who once committed, pines for his pet dog, Veronica, who is going to get euthanized if he can’t get to her in time, featured in the song FOR VERONICA’S SAKE.   The snake Veronica, is quickly booted out the back door of the asylum when Alice is committed….more on her later.

Now “normalized”, a sedate Alice is wheeled into the main recreation hall where we are introduced to the rest of the album’s main characters.  TIFFANY SLEEK, the delusional, entitled, debutante from the song WISH I WAS BORN IN BEVERLY HILLS, JEROME, the sexually psychotic “priest”  who’s narrative drives the song NURSE ROSETTA (and not too funny anymore about priests being sexually deviant, huh?).  MILLIE and BILLIE sit in mutual admiration, seemingly unaffected by the chaos all around them…and you already met the rest.  If you look closely, keen eyes will notice J. Wellington Wimpy, Bluto, Popeye and The Hulk of all characters, huddling up in the background, working through their therapy sessions.

The next chunk of story comes from Alice’s point of view as he begins socializing within his new found group of inmates.  These are all played out in mini-vignettes as we further delve into the personalities of these mentally ill characters (information that serves absolutely no narrative within the story).   Strangely within the few minutes it takes for Alice to work the room, his hair magically goes from short, back to long…if this was to signify the passage of time, I didn’t get the memo.

Alice accidentally smashes through a fellow inmates paint canvas and decides to use the paint to re-apply his trademark make-up to his face, while exclaiming that he is NOT CRAZY!  This is followed by a zany, One-Flew-Over-The-Choo Choo’s Nest style botched escape attempt that lands him another night in the Quiet Room.  This time, Alice is strapped down tight to his bed with leather belts, which is really for nothing when Nurse Rosetta comes in later and mercifully takes them off to make him more comfortable.

Of course, Alice makes haste and uses a bunch of tied sheets to shimmy his way down the asylum wall.  Once at the bottom he bumps into a small red box and when he opens it….VERONICA!!!!!!  Now reunited with his beloved Boa, Alice makes his way to the outer containment wall.  Then, like something out of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Alice uses Veronica (or Veronica uses herself) as a whip to catapult Alice over the wall and onward to freedom.

Alice runs far away to a town called Millville, seemingly far away from the asylum.  There a parade of some kind seems to be taking place, but upon closer inspection we learn that this is all just a giant rally because, wait for it, …ALEX Cooper is now running for Governor!!!  Of course, ALICE Cooper is now suffering from PTSD and tries to warn everyone that ALEX is just a psychopath dressed as a politician.  This info flew like a frozen piece of shit, and the cops quickly apprehend Alice once again.

For his troubles, Alice (now with Veronica) is re-committed to the insane asylum, where they are deposited back into the Quiet Room to contemplate all that’s transpired.  Alice breaks the fourth wall yet again to tell us what’s up.

Essentially this story is paper thin on plot and heavy on shenanigans and plays MUCH better as a companion piece to the album than it does as a self-contained story or a launching pad to its own series…at least as far as this one issue was concerned.  Marvel by their own admission was hoping that there would be enough interest to launch an ALICE COOPER ongoing series, as was the forum that MARVEL PREMIERE provided.  As it turned out, fans were happy enough with this standalone outing …at least until Marvel tried again 15 years later.

I’ve gotta say, I absolutely LOVE this comic book just the way it is.  Clunky editing, outdated humor, one note plot and all.  Nothing that came after, so perfectly captured the essence and the tongue-in-cheek irony that in essence IS Alice Cooper.  This played out like a skit from THE MUPPET SHOW (of which he was once the host) and who doesn’t love that?

Strangely, this comic book was devoid of Writer/Artist/Editor/Letterer/Colorist credits from cover to cover.  I have no idea why that important information was left out, as it was NEVER left out of any Marvel book to my estimation.  Anyway…..

The Art was fantastic in this book and provided by TOM SUTTON (Pencils) and TERRY AUSTIN (inks), drawn in a classic satiric style that one could harken back to a spoof strip in the magazine, CRAZY.

The Script was written by several peeps (not sure this story needed that many) ED HANNIGAN, JIM SALICRUP, ROGER STERN and Mr. ALICE COOPER himself.

The Colors were provided by the multitalented MARIE SEVRIN with Letters provided by TOM ORZECHOWSKI. 

This was the very first comic book appearance for Alice Cooper, but certainly far from the last.  There was an issue dedicated to Coop’ in ROCK AND ROLL/Revolutionary Comics #18 back in 1990, which acted as a “ VH1 Behind the Music” episode, before there was such a thing.  This would be followed by award winning writer Neil Gaiman’s take, as a tie in to Alice’s then newest record release THE LAST TEMPTATION, also by Marvel Comics in 1994.  This one followed the continuing story of “Steven” who reprised his role from Alice’s debut solo album WELCOME TO MY NIGHTMARE.  Next up, Dynamite Entertainment took a boa constrictor swing in 2014, which I admittedly have NOT checked out at the time of this writing, but it has a second volume slated for release in October 2023, from what Cold Ethyl tells me.

As the years went on, ALICE COOPER remained a constant in my life.  Much like how his later comic book incarnations would infiltrate the lives of living, from an unspecified anti-world, where nothing was safe, nothing was real, and nothing was off limits.  Alice was like a spiritual father figure to me…paving the world with four (4) albums before I was even born, and another twenty-five (25) at the time I release this Clot.  Until recently, I was unsure if Alice would outlive even me, which would have been interesting within its own rite. 

But he, along with my artist Uncle Tom and his posthumous deep, dark artistry had created a somewhat morbid, often times insane, second nuclear family for me for me to reside and be influenced within.  I would grow up to become a misunderstood artist/musician amalgamation of my own, possessed by rockstars and gilded by ghosts. 

Good old boys and girls.
Congregating, waiting in some other world.
We're all crazy.

We're all crazy.

We're all crazy.

We're all crazy.

We're all crazy.

We're all crazy.

We're all crazy.

We're all crazy.

We're all crazy….

D. ROOK

18AUG2023

EPISODE 8: THE PLANT PEOPLE (1977/Laurel Leaf/Dell Publishing)

Greetings Roughian Readers of all things Fun and Mental and welcome to another episode of Blood Clots! The black scab on the ass of the internet that dares to delve into the underbelly of outlaw pop (or not so pop) culture in all of its devious incarnations.

This time around, I'm turning the fucking cat around once again to talk about one of my favorite subjects.  The darkest form of literature the world has ever known … CHILDREN'S BOOKS!  That's right kids, nothing says trauma like a good scholastic panic-inducing read.

Don't believe me? I dare you to read any unabridged Grimm fairy tale to your freshly minted bundle o' love then join them in prayer with a George Orwell crucifix over the bed and see how many DSS infractions ensue. Hell, it's 2023 America. Your lightly enjoyed copy of Captain Underpants is being thrown into the same bin of contempt as Animal Farm and Catcher in the Rye...and remember, the latter two were required reading in High Schools across America back in the 80's.

Ah the 80's - when you didn't have to fuck off to your safe place just to get through Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. 

But alas, I'm not here to soliloquize about the impact of high-brow, provocative reading material such as the aforementioned titles above. 

Instead, I want to zero in on one single, 96-page, chunk of pulp from the sadistic folks at Dell Publishing and their selection from the "Laurel Leaf Library" that might as well been the Gorgon Video of young adult literature back in the 1970's.  

As the tagline warned: "When the fog came with its tiny dancing lights, the terrible things began..."  And of course with that, I'm talking about Dale Carlson's THE PLANT PEOPLE!

Now interestingly enough, the title is listed as a "young Adult" novella (barely more than a short story to be fair) but it was solicited in grade school libraries across America back in 1977 so that those in kindergarten through 5th grade could enjoy the level of trauma usually reserved for their adult counterparts.

As it were, this book awaited me in my 2nd grade school library which was right off of the lunch room and thus transforming it into the equivalent of a video stores "adults only" section. With all the hyperbole presented so far, you're probably thinking that someone snuck in a novelization of Dawn of the Dead and slipped it between copies of Where Do Babies Come From and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth....but to a seven year old like me at that time, The Plant People might as well have been.

On the surface, this is a straight up clean cut narrative that offers nothing new to the genre, but keeping in mind that little junior is the intended demographic, one can't help but notice how incredibly nihilistic the tone of this story was. 

Someone over at Dell Publishing must have figured that the fastest way to a kids nightmares would be to add pictures to accompany this narrative, and its really what anyone talks about who digested this tale of woe way back then. The photographs provided by Chuck Freedman made you feel like you were reading a novelization of a movie that didn’t exist, …but should have!

Here we go, kids…the ill-fated tale of The Plant People.

Our story opens in the town of Cactus, Nevada, a half empty town of less than 200 civilians, out in the middle of a sprawling desert called Dry Valley. The inhabitants seem to have settled into their lives, never daring to be anything at all.

All that is, but one teenage boy who wants nothing more than to make Cactus a memory in his rearview.. Mike Ward aspires to be an Ethologist as he has a deep fascination to study animals in their own habitat, much to his father Paul's chagrin. 

Paul Ward is depicted as an angry head-of-household type, and it's more than implied that he is emotionally abusive to his wife (and perhaps physically too). His wife Nancy barely speaks above a whisper to express her own feelings or opinions, even to the defense of her own two children. Mike’s little brother Jimmy on the other hand, has no problem encouraging his older brother to follow his dreams in spite of what anyone in Cactus may think.

Mike spends much of his time at the local horse stable, oblivious to the signals of Jenny, who pines for Mike's heart and attention. It's also of note that even though the author spends the time establishing that Jenny and Mike are a budding "thing", Mike spends the entirety of the story coming across as A-sexual. Even before the terror ensues, there’s no time for love, Dr. jones.

One random day while riding his mare across the barren landscape of Dry Valley, he sees a mysterious fog descend on the town of Cactus up ahead. The fog behaves as a sentient being, with cloudy tendrils that extend and augment seemingly with purpose. Inside the fog are described as tiny dancing lights. Unnaturally, the fog then crawls across the sky away from Cactus to parts unknown, cutting through Mike and his mare in it’s wake.

Though random and uncanny, there seem to be no other ill effects from the event. Dr. Peters, the only apparent doctor in Cactus, insists that medically, everyone is 100% fine. That is until, …THE FIRST CHANGE.

The next day, Mike wakes up and goes downstairs to find his mother and father at the breakfast table, acting less like themselves and more like something out of The Stepford Wives. Most of the townsfolk begin to change before Mike’s very eyes. Fist it starts with euphoric behavioral changes that appear to make day-to-day living more strangely pleasant, …especially considering Mike's home life.

Soon after, the townies begin a haunting pantomime routine of their former lives, almost in blissful mockery of their old routines and mannerisms. Smiling blindly as they do. Every so often a townie will stop to lovingly admire a random plant in the ground.

Mike and his friends, consisting of Sam Pearson, the stable owner, Charlie and Jonsie, the rattlesnake wranglers and Jenny, the cucked love interest, begin raising awareness of this catastrophe and their desire to seek help from the neighboring Carson City, a city described as much more equipped and prepared to handle a happening of this magnitude.

A town meeting held by Mayor Fletcher and Sheriff Carter dismisses the incident and determines that Cactus can handle their own problems with no outside help from "big city folk".

Mike and friends aren’t having it and secretly call Carson City from an abandoned sheriffs office. They talk to a detective, who deploys a helicopter to investigate, but upon arrival see that the townsfolk are all “happy” and “cooperative” and deem the visit a false alarm. As the helicopter leaves Cactus behind, all hope departs with it.

Things rapidly go from bad to worse as the townsfolk begin falling into a catatonic state. Staring out windows at the greenery outside and little else. Most have stopped talking or eating. It’s then that Mike notices the most horrific evolution when he gazed at his own mother’s hands and face - dark green veins, like that of a plant leaf, strewn across the changing texture of her skin as we enter, THE THIRD STAGE.

Why have only most of the town fallen prey to this infection but not everyone? Why were no animals effected? Where did the fog come from? Where did it go?

By now, all of the infected were wandering the town aimlessly, stopping at the sight of plant life. Their skin encrusted with dark veiny markings of a plant. Mike watched on as he felt someone grab his shoulder. It was Larry Borden, a friend from school. He was also infected, zombified and motioning for Mike to take him into Dry Valley. It was there that Larry knelt by a cactus plant and placed his hands upon it, and began to FEED. They feed from plant life. All of the infected - Now including, Mike’s little brother, Jimmy!

In desperation, Mike takes Jimmy to Carson City to meet with the doctor there (who goes nameless). Seeing Jimmy’s condition in the flesh prompted the doctor to contact Dr. Joe Blake, a friend from Washington who deemed the outbreak in Cactus a full blown epidemic , now coined “Cactus Disease”.

Jimmy’s blood samples yielded results that arrested the scientific community. His blood cells were transforming to those of a plant. The government was informed that “Cactus Disease” could not have been caused by anything on our planet. Finally, the situation was being taken seriously, but not in time to save THE LOST.

Back in Cactus, many of the infected begin to go missing. The few who were not effected by the disease formed search parties to find their loved ones. Mike and his friends pondered the events that had transpired. They feared that the town of Cactus was “attacked” by an alien force and that the fog infected certain people for a yet unknown reason, that there was a final stage to this occurrence that had yet to reveal itself.

Soon after, Mike discovered a cactus growing on the front walk. A slingshot dangled from its thorns. Jimmy’s slingshot.

That night, Mike, Jenny and friends raced to the outstretches of town, where the desert began. And it was there that they made their discovery. Jenny’s grandmother was standing there motionless. Her feet were already rooted into the ground. Rapidly she began to change. Her body stiffened, her skin turned cactus green, thorns sprouted from everywhere and then it was done. The final stage complete. This was the fate of all who had been infected and gone missing. They all became “Plant People” in the end.

In Washington, A state of emergency was declared and a race for a cure commenced. Many theories were abound. Perhaps Aliens were planning a fully fledged attack on our planet, but the oxygen levels were not high enough to sustain this alien race. Perhaps they used the town of Cactus as a “testing ground” to perform their experiment. By turning humans into plants, the oxygen levels would rise, deeming it safe for the aliens to attack.

Back in Cactus, Mike also had his theories. Perhaps only people who were negatively effecting the environment were targeted. His friends and he took care of animals, cared for the environment. Perhaps that’s why they were spared.

Mike followed what was now national news on television. Tsukuhara, Japan was attacked by the mysterious and deadly fog. Then England. Paris. Moscow. The world leaders settled their differences. The arms race halted. Enemies worked together in a race only for a cure for this growing pandemic.

A special news report interrupted all stations. A CURE HAS BEEN FOUND. Dr. Blake and his team of scientists have discovered “a simple remedy” that could cure everyone, as it was reported. “Just take - “ …

A fog covered the screen. In the fog were tiny dancing lights.

The screen went dead.

The end.

Yep. Storytime’s over, Kids. Time to go to bed. Sweet dreams n’ shit.

In 2023 I went on a search for this book, and eventually found an original print, lightly used softcover copy with the front cover image of a hand reaching high into the hot Nevada desert, while the lower half of the arm has turned into what looks like a rooted tree.

Considering it was 43 years since last I held this book in my hands, I was immediately surprised at how small this book was, both in dimension and in length. With pictures included, it was 93 pages long, and the extra-large print size was closer to what would cater to those with bad eyesight.

I was able to read The Plant People very quickly - barely 30 minutes cover to cover, and it was apparent that the book was written with little in terms of style or substance. It moved forward at a breakneck pace, never lingering on the impact of the horror. A very matter-of-fact narrative that literally completes the entire third act in about 5 pages.

Truth be told of this haunting affair, EVERYTHING about the impact of this book was predicated on how young and impressionable I was at the time I first read it. With the nostalgia removed from the influence of this review, it's a story that feels like it was also written by a seven year old as well as being intended for one.

But only in 1977 could someone write an apocalyptic tale of aliens taking away our humanity by turning us into Plant People by way of Night of the Living Dead, and pepper in the terror of loosing your entire family at a young age to malevolent forces beyond your control. Throw in subtext about emotional and physically abusive households, dirty politics and misinformation (that still goes on to this day), and ad a cherry on top of this hell and let everyone die on a global scale at the end via The Day After...

Then sell it to a kid the age of six, and call it education.

Somewhere out there in the universe, someone's father or mother, aunt or uncle, sister or brother may have read this cautionary tale of woe waaaay back when.  And like me, they may have succumb to the doom and gloom that was presented in this prepubescent masterpiece (of ruling kids minds through abject terror).

On the bright, at least mom didn't give birth to a cactus and name it after you, kids! …OUCH!

See you next Clot!

D. Rook

30JUN23

EPISODE 6: FRIGHT NIGHT (NOW/AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY)

When it comes to vampire movies of the 80s, two titans stand tall above the throat-rending pack...and to pick one or the other as your partorn bloodsucker flick, is to draw battle lines that cut straight to the marrow, etch fightin’ words in stone, and leave life-ending street brawls with friends and loved ones a very, very real possibility, for the rest of your accursed life. I speak, of course, of THE LOST BOYS and FRIGHT NIGHT (and before you come running in here screaming “hah, fuck that - NEAR DARK!!!”, just know that you’re bringin’ the same energy as the guy who says “I don’t HAVE A TV!” when someone asks you what your favorite show is...we  get it, Near Dark is awesome and you’re a badass, needle dick.

I go back and forth on the subject - I love both, for very different reasons - but you’ve come to the CASKET for COMICS...and in that fight there is one, very clear winner, …Ladies and Gentlemen, WELCOME TO FRIGHT NIGHT…..FOR REAL!

Published from 1988 to 1993 by the infamous NOW COMICS (home to, among other things, RALPH SNART ADVENTURES, a title you’ll be hearing a LOT more about right here in days to come), FRIGHT NIGHT began as a two-part adaptation of the hit 1985 flick (starring...well come on, you know, if you don’t have the flick within arm’s reach, you’re a pud), before spinning out into a full blown, ongoing sequel.

The first near-year trucked along well enough, with Charley Brewster and Peter Vincent becoming full-fledged monster hunters, fight random beasts like parasitic brain-bats, octopus guys, some big weirdass spider, and yes, some vampires along the way...perfectly serviceable stuff. I could tell you who wrote it, who illustrated, what the hell happened to Amy along the way...but if we’re being perfectly honest with each other, I don’t feel like it. I have just about the entire run in a nice, fat stack right here next to me, all it would take is the slightest effort, but I can’t be bothered. Why? For starters, I’m too sober for that shit (a mistake I will NOT make again), but more importantly, we’re building to something. And that “something”, was and is, NEIL VOKES.

Now Vokes might immediately trip some triggers amongst the...two...three?...of you that read this; the cat has landed gigs at every hut from Comico, to Marvel and DC, to Dark Horse and Image. This guy has been EVERYWHERE in the back issue bins you scumbags regularly haunt, trying to find that reasonably priced copy of Verotika #4 (oh you ARE dirty little kids, aint’cha?). But the only title that can unlock this entire article, is a little something called FLESH AND BLOOD.

Put out by the ill-fated-but-well-intentioned MONSTERVERSE imprint, and written by one Robert Tinnell, “Flesh” is basically a Hammer horror epic told in pulp, blood, tits, and vibes intact. ONE glance at this series, and the canny amongst you will surely say “golly goshes, this fellow would certainly be gangbusters on a FRIGHT NIGHT comic!” And indeed, he VERY much was.

To put it plainly, Neil Vokes brought personality to the series. Measurable, identifiable, feral PERSONALITY to an IP that quite simply DEMANDED it from the outset. Vokes IMMEDIATELY scars Fright Night, just by walking through the front fucking door, and for nine solid issues, Fright Night is not only HIS, but Fright Night is REAL...on your radar, something you wanna read, something that forces itself into your reality as a real-deal sequel, something that is...well...a lot, I say A LOT better than the actual, honest-to-God FRIGHT NIGHT PART II.

Ah, yes. Fright Night PART II. About that. Guess we should get into it.

Unleashed to an appropriately-dismissive reaction that Christmas season, Fright Night PART II was a black eye to mainstream fans, plain and simple. The plot sucked, the payoff sucked, the whole thing was a Johnny-come-TOO-late, unsatisfying sequel that simply checked off too few of the required boxes to justify its existence. We wouldn’t even be talking about it, were it not for the fact that the eventual remake, and the direct-to-DVD “sequel”/remake OF THAT, were so ass-fuckingly insulting, that the OG 80s sequel wound up looking KIND of respectable by comparison. And that, boils and ghouls, can be summed up in five, simple points. So let’s hit ‘em and quit ‘em, gang!

One, it still has a BIT of that cool 80s vibe hovering over it that feels like a warm blanket in a childhood bedroom, so while it’s precious little in the grand scheme of things, it SHOULD be mentioned. Two, it’s got the insanely hot Traci Lind running around in it (again - later, Amy!). Three, the final “boss fight” form of the otherwise ridiculous head vamp Regine (Jerry Dandrige’s sister, for some reason) is an insanely cool Greg Cannom monstrosity that deserves all the love you can hose it with. But MOST importantly, reasons four and five - BOZWORTH and LOUIE (or “Bug Boy and The Wolfman”, as I like to call ‘em) two of Regine’s thugs (played with bottomless wells of charisma and charm by Brian Thompson and Jon Gries, respectively) who steal every scene they’re in.

Alright, enough fuckin’ Fright Night Part II. It may be better than any of the shit flicks that came after it, but as steered by Vokes, the comic book sequel beats its cinematic counterpart’s ass and takes its lunch money.

So…here’s the deal. ( Pregnant cracked knuckled pause) ...EVIL ED IS DEPICTED AS A MAN-BAT ROCKSTAR WITH A HAREM OF VAMPIRE GROUPIES. I could stop this article RIGHT GODDAMN NOW, and I’ll have said the most important thing you’ll hear all week. All that shit I wrote about Fright Night Part II, you can print this article up, rip that section out, crumple it up and throw it at your fuckin’ mom, because at no point in that limp pretender to the throne does it feature EVIL GODDAMNED ED as a man-bat rockstar , so it can piss right off (although Louie was, initially, written as Evil Ed, which is probably why the character is so goddamned freakin’ rad).

Listen, we all know Stephen Geoffries is a rockstar in real life, with such immortal roles as Hoax (976-EVIL) and Sam Ritter (if you know, you know, baby!) under his belt, but Evil Ed is without question the character that firmly places him on Mount Olympus, and he is ALL OVER this thing. His face peers out at you from the covers (in both illustrated and live action form!), his man-bat form lurks up by the little NOW logo, and his rise to power in a (temporarily) Jerry Dandrige-less world is a central through line in the ongoing story. And thank GOD, because if you didn’t pretend you were Evil Ed after watching Fright Night as a kid, you were PROBABLY one of those kids that was, you know...not overly worth playing with. I said what I said.

Oh, if only Vokes had illustrated the whole series. If only there was even MORE Ed. If only the best-written issues were more representative of the series as a whole. If only...if only we could hit reset, and do it perfectly...do it NOW.

Wait, what’s this? Oh...oh, holy shit. HOLY SHIT.

Sometimes, our foul prayers are answered, and this very November, publisher American Mythology is unleashing TOM HOLLAND’S FRIGHT NIGHT, a real-deal canon sequel to the original masterpiece...FINALLY!

Authorized and overseen by Holland himself, and written by American Mythology Pres’ James Kuhoric (who knocked it out of the park with Wildstorm’s FREDDY vs JASON vs ASH some years back), the 1986-set sequel sees the gang return for more vampiric monster slaughter, just as God intended, seems to promise more Ed (how could they not?), and is set to be illustrated by none other than NEIL MUTHAFUCKIN’ VOKES (along with one Cyrus Mesarcia, who appears more than up to the task). This Thanksgiving, the armies of the night are coming...and you will ABSOLUTELY find me on the dancefloor.

EPISODE 5: GUTWRENCHER (IMAGE/SHADOWLINE/IDW)

Slashers, by and large, are creatures of the cinema. And cinema breeds many things…trends, fads, new genres and subgenres…but beyond all else, cinema breeds fans. Fanboys, fangirls….nerds. Cinema breeds nerds, let's not mince words. Hey, I’M a nerd, and I’m damned proud of it. And as many of you already know, nerds do more than just watch movies; where there are nerds, there are comics.

And so it goes, the slasher has spread far beyond the confines of its cinematic birthing place, and into the realm of four-color slaughter. We’ve covered a few already here in the Casket, and there is plenty of fuel in the tank to keep that goin’ for a good, long while. All the heavy hitters have had comics of their own…Freddy, Jason, Michael (appearing in easily the best of the lot, I might add), Leatherface, even Chucky….but some real treats, as it so often happens with this genre, can be found in the off-brand entries in the slasher sweepstakes.

GUTWRECHER (great goddamn title!) was a three issue mini-series created by the usually awful Steve Niles (look, someone had to say it, don’t fucking lie to yourself) & Kieth Giffen, written by Shannon Eric Denton, and illustrated by Anthony Hightower, which quietly debuted in 2008 by Image/Shadowline to little fanfare or acclaim. Announced some years before it was ever completed or released, it seems to have been forgotten by the time a single issue had ever even come out. Which is a shame, because it’s a great little subversion/love letter to the classics of the slasher genre.  

Coming off as a modern reinvention of Slaughter High, our story focuses on a bitter young man (who goes nameless), who grows more bitter still over having not been invited to the high school reunion. Typically, this right here is enough to launch a vengeance-fueled murder spree, culminating in our pariah baring supernatural invulnerability and mowing down just about everyone who ever looked at him wrong. However, things are a little different here. Turns out, back in Ireland in 798 A.D., a murderous leper-priest, and worshiper of foul earth gods, is captured and taken to the village “truth tree”…endure the tree, you earn your trip to Valhalla. 

Unfortunately, enduring the tree involves being disemboweled and having your organs nailed to said tree to receive judgment. Well, our rotting priest does survive, calling down the wrath of his gods in front of the horrified Celtic warriors who mistakenly thought they’d just taken out the garbage. The priest grabs the sword (with which he was supposed to kill himself with, thereby earning his status as an innocent – remind me never to commit a crime in Ireland) and a pitched massacre ensues, ultimately ending with the bandage-wrapped fiend slaughtering the entire village, and hurling himself and his entrail-enwrapped chunk o’ truth tree into the ocean.

Funnily enough, our pissed off anti-hero, strolling in the woods to cool off after being snubbed for the high school reunion, finds the accursed log in a logger jam. In modern times. In America. Huh? Anyway, running his fingers along it’s nail-and-rune studded contours, he cuts his finger…proving to be very unfortunate indeed. Surging with rage and a centuries-in-the-making curse, he abruptly butchers his girlfriend (and just about any other living thing in his path, as these things go), raids a fish & game shop for weapons, and sets off for the reunion to settle some old scores. With that for a set-up, you can hardly go wrong.

Our protagonists are a typical lot, to be sure; a cast of Big Chill hangers-ons who reunite to relive past glories and rekindle past romances, they’re nowhere near as interesting as our crazed ”hero”, rapidly turning into modern mirror of his bandaged Celtic prototype, tossing out acidic wisecracks and shedding more plasma than your local blood bank, and turning the secluded (really damned secluded…as in, surrounded by miles of forest and dwelling in the shadow of a cliffside lighthouse secluded) reunion grounds into his personal killing fields. In yet another interesting twist, it’s ultimately revealed that the maniacal slasher was hated for a reason, having virtually assaulted a girl who shot him down for a date, and getting expelled in the process. Conversely, the brutal beating doled out by the “good guys” over the incident was needlessly savage in its own right, eliminating any clear-cut heroes or victims. Nuance...in a slasher potboiler. Like a drop of water in a desert, or a Steve Niles comic you remember after five minutes (okay, I’ll stop...for now).

Full of surprises, unexpected character twists, a killer set-up and enough gore to satisfy its target audience and then some, Gutwrencher, in the right hands, would make a damned fine movie in it’s own right. As it stands, it’s a damned fine, already unjustly obscure (though that’s strangely kind of appropriate) bit of illustrated slasher horror that’s currently rotting in the back issue bin of your local comic shop. And happily, the fine folks at IDW collected this unjustly neglected beast in 2011, complete with some groovy supplemental material, including bitchin’ pin-ups and the like.

Look, you’ve really got nothing to lose on this one; You can get this shit cheap, and you’re honestly kind of missing out if you don’t dip your toes in it.

So if Prom Night or Terror Train gets your temple throbbing, and if the very thought of Return To Horror High gives you a nostalgia boner for the days of mom n’ pop video stores, Friday nights, family-sized bags of Doritos and USA Up All Night, …AND if you’ve got yourself a short box of horror comics with a good three or four spaces left to fill...track down some Gutwrencher…

…You’ll be happy you did!

EPISODE 4: BODY COUNT (Aircel)

Welcome back, Casketeers! After a borderline comical string of life-shattering tragedies laid your crypt-keepin’ host low for a good couple’a months there, licking his wounds in a dank cave like Michael Myers in between Halloween 4 and 5. But, after an ersatz Four Loko transfusion performed by Derek Rook in a rusting Midwestern barn under the influence of peyote, I am off the bench and ready to give you the hot, stinky, wet goods.

Sooooo, where the fuck to begin on this one?

I suppose a little background is in order before we dive into the autopsy. Back in the 80s, at the height of the black and white indie comics boom, a handful of publishers had established themselves as the premier purveyors of the form. This included Dark Horse (making a splash with Aliens, now set to be published by the beast that is Disney-Marvel), Mirage (the immortal Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, natch’), Fantaco (Gore Shriek, you may have heard of it), Arrow (The Dead. you, uh, may have heard of it), and the startlingly eclectic Aircel Comics. Aircel prolifically put out comics from all conceivable genres, with a soft spot for weirdo, blood-soaked horror comics. They adapted H.G. Lewis. They had a comic called The Walking Dead 15 years before Image. And in late 1989, they unleashed the four-part slasher send-up Body Count!

Written by Barry Blair & illustrated by Dave Cooper, Body Count comes off as a freakish hybrid of Killer Party, Student Bodies, The Toxic Avenger, and any 50s monster-on-the-loose flick you faintly remember playing somewhere behind Elvira’s heaving, pendulous...wit.

Our protagonists, such as they are, are Professor “Prof” Chill, & his outlandish sexual caricature girlfriend Becky (who indeed has some heaving, pendulous witsa). To call these characters stereotypes would be both a massive understatement, and massively redundant. Every character in the story is a stereotype turned up to 11, and deliberately so. Prof Chill is so stiff, naïve, and verbose it’s a shock he’s not constantly screaming “God save the Queen!” through pipe-clenched teeth. His chiseled good looks and perfect blond hair call to mind someone who should always be clutching a tall glass of milk. Speaking of milk, Becky, on the other hand, looks like she’s constantly posing for a wet T-shirt contest. She alternates between screaming and giggling. I wanted to rip Prof’s face off with a cheese grater. Becky can stay!

The REAL hero of the book is the gawky college janitor, lovingly dubbed “Wanker” by the hateful student body (and faculty, for that matter). I’m sure you’ve connected the dots long before you arrived at this sentence, but for posterity’s sake, the inciting incident goes something like this: Prof Chill is working on a serum for shits & giggles, the point of which he’s not even sure (though he randomly assumes that it could turn nerds into jocks, because….well, why the hell not).

Some stoners break into Chill’s lab after hours looking to steal anything that might get them high, tip over a beaker of Chill’s super-slime, and ol’ Wank shows up to clean up the mess. And eats it! Yes; decides to taste some, right off the floor.

Within moments of declaring it tasty stuff, Wank swells into a hulking, screaming, seeping Hideshi Hino reject, and stumbles backward into a diving suit Chill just picked up for a romantic nautical getaway with good ol’ Beckers. What emerges is a hideously deformed creature of superhuman size and strength, ready to do some Killer Party-ing with anything that crosses his path. And party he does.

His first order of business is to pop out of nowhere, ambushing the two stoners who got him into this mess (who are naturally startled by the sudden appearance of a diving-helmeted phantasm), shove his, mop – head first – into the mouth and out the back of the skull of one, and ram a lab microscope through the eyeball of another.

Wasting no time, he wanders to the school pool and fries some revelers by tossing a little live cable into the pool, then tracks down the cruel dean of the college (who gets to see what Wank looks like under his helmet….we don’t, but I have to assume he looks like a pissed off Madball) and force-feeds him a can of drain-o!

From here on out it’s a relentless, brainless bloodbath as Wank murders any and everything in countless gruesome ways, much to the chagrin of many innocent bystanders.

He crushes the head of a fisherman in a swamp with his hands (sending his eyeballs flying into the air), and at one point leaps out from behind a tree and knocks a motorcyclist’s head off with a fish(!), sending his female companion to splatter against a nearby tree. Eventually Wank comes across the redneck sheriff and rams himself face-first into his back (Jesus Christ!)! Slapping his helmet onto the sheriff’s carcass, Wank uses his body like a vile puppet, almost resembling a perverse version of two guys in a horse costume. With his new, powerful body, wank goes about simply tearing people’s heads clean off with extreme prejudice.

So what’s the point of the story, and where does it go?

Nothing & nowhere, friend.

It’s all about watching Wank slaughter innocents in increasingly bizarre, ghoulish and ridiculous ways (at one point he mounts an assault on a barber shop), as the good guys scramble about ineffectually trying to stop the beast, cracking an endless stream of mega-lame jokes along the way.

Eventually the super over-the-top military joins the fray and drop a nuke on Wank (hell, slashers don’t go down easy…why take a chance?), and we’re left wondering what radiation will do to the already wildly mutated body of our once gentle janitor. And Finito!

So, how does all this moist nonsense LOOK?

Dave Cooper has a very unique style, at times reminding me of a cross between the work of Marc Hansen (Ralph Snart Adventures, another B&W indie classic from the 80s) and the packaging art from the old Mad Scientist toys Mattel put out around the time. Unlike a lot of said indie classics, Cooper’s work would have looked a lot better in vivid color. With some hues it would have resembled something like a segment of Heavy Metal, and it would have benefited the book greatly. All the same, I gotta say I like Dave’s style, though I’m sure it’s not for everyone.

Every damned bit as stupid as the dreck it’s aping – and every bit as fun – Body Count is a lost mini-classic that fans of this site would be a perfect audience for. They’re gonna get it the most, and definitely have the most fun with it. Just put on your bootlegs of Commander USA’s Groovy Movies in the background, grab a 40-count bag of pizza rolls, and enjoy!

EPISODE 3: TOOL (Northstar)

One tends to think of the 1980s as a particularly special time for “mature readers” horror comics, with madness like Faust, Deadworld, Twisted Tales, and of course Gore Shriek running absolutely wild across the tall racks of local comic shops (and finding their way into countless trash cans courtesy of puffy-shouldered moms). R-rated splatter had finally come into its own, and broken free of any real form of industry-enforced censorship, and it was a goddamn party.

So much so, that it can be easy to forget that some of the goriest, most perverse comics ever actually came out in the 1990s, a decade known for its overall vanilla wafer blandness. But it wasn’t all a PC buzzkill; for every Hansen there must be a Manson, and so it was in the world of comics.

Enter the infamous Northstar, publisher of the aforementioned Faust, and the notorious (and pretty damned good) adaptation of Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III. Along with Hart Fisher’s Boneyard Press (publisher of unrivaled controversy magnet Jeffery [sic] Dahmer: An unauthorized biography of a serial killer), and the ever dependable Fantaco, Northstar was the premier publisher of naughty-ass horror comics. Chief among the in-house line was Splatter, a splatterpunk anthology with a little bit of a nastier edge than many, leaning in to themes of urban violence and nightly-news-born horrors over rubber monsters and slasher slaughter. Well...for the most part.

After Tim Vigil (and more about him in a bit) took his creation Faust to his own company Rebel Studios, Northstar thrashed about trying to groom their own, company owned horror stars to rival their former superstar tenant. It, um...didn’t go super well. Arguably the most pushed of these characters was Klownshock, a character basically based on Tommy Pons’ mascot for forgotten metal act Dangerous Toys (sorry, guys). A cool looking character for sure, Klowny was basically just Evil Ernie with greasepaint, and while fun, was justifiably relegated to the dustbin of history. Then we have Miseroth, who resembles a Satanic Derek Rook (hey, don’t kill the fakkin’ messenger; that’s more presentable than me, who just comes off as a real life Trevor Philips), and he’s a...punishing demon or something, I don’t know, I don’t really know what the hell is going on with Miseroth. But easily the most interesting, and by a substantial margin...was Adam McDaniel’s Tool.

With Klownshock, you have a killer clown. Fair enough. With Miseroth, you have a demon who very likely listens to Type O Negative. Fine. But Tool...Tool was something else entirely. Debuting as the final, self-titled short in 1994’s Splatter Annual, Tool comes across as a Monkey’s Paw Pinhead, with a teeny bit of Predator just for style...a creature from beyond our reality, from a place not unlike our interpretation of Hell, an unfathomable avatar of human agony (shades of Joe Landsdale’s God of the Razor), who nevertheless can enter our plane and act on our behalf - so long as something bleeds, and suffers, and what we consider “good” is defiled in the end. Think Wishmaster if Wishmaster didn’t suck and was exec’ produced by Clive Barker, and designed by Bernie Wrightson. No, seriously, this is some crazy shit, and it’s a damned shame it didn’t catch on.

So, our debut tale begins on a chilly note, with narration from a freshly murdered boy about what led him to his current state, and as it so happens, it was unpleasant. After watching his stepfather smash his mother’s brains in with a claw hammer during an all-too-familiar argument, he soon winds up curled up in his jammies, with blood from his tiny skull soaking into the floorboards.

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But that uplifting intro is only the beginning. Soon, rising from the carnage, arrives Tool (the unfathomable cosmic monster, not the industrious prog band), and he is displeased with our hammer-wielding bad dad...but not because he slaughtered an innocent, not quite. Tool feels robbed of the pleasure of administering a lifetime of suffering to the boy himself, so now naughty daddy has to pay the toll, the Frank Cotton way. And oh, does he ever. Imagine Warlock from The New Mutants erupt out of your body like a chestburster, …and you get the idea...sorta.

Whatever the case, our hapless narrator is mercifully spared Tool’s razored clutches. He’s moved on to a peaceful little plot of land, right next to his mother, six feet down where murderous stepparents and cybernetic hellbeasts can no longer harm them. Don’t cha love happy endings?!

The following year saw the eponymous fiend get his own one shot, reprinting the original tale and following it up with new installments, that take things in some...interesting directions. Read on!

Meat follows the unlucky tale of a young couple whose car breaks down near the shack of a human-skin-wearing axe murderer (living in Wisconsin, this is as common as being drunk by noon). Set up by the maniac, hubby is chopped into cold cuts, and his lady love flees the scene (and right into the killer’s body-strewn lair, in typical slasher fashion). At this point, our old pal Tool once again rises from the gore puddle, and grants our victim the “gift” of revenge from beyond the grave...reconfiguring the heap of body parts into a twisted hulk that sets out for a little eye-for-an-eye justice. Unfortunately, he Kool-Aid-Mans his way into the dilapidated cabin, just in time to find the axe man burying the hatchet in his beloved’s brain. He leaves the killer in pieces, of course, but with nothing left to live for, he shambles into the nearby forest, forever cursed, like a Swamp Thing made of overripe deli selections. Just then, the axe man’s severed head wakes up, promising god-knows-what. Will these two undead abominations have a rematch? Are there just two murderous beasts forever loose in these woods now? Who knows? Whatever the case, I’m sure Tool’s just happy to have made an even bigger mess of things.

Our trilogy of terrors concludes with The Milk of Human Suffering, and boy oh boy, brothers and sisters, this is the reason you’ve shown up. Look, I’m gonna cut straight to the point - a guy is executed for fucking his favorite cow. There’s now no way to dress this up; this guy’s been slippin’ the long pig to his favorite side o’ beef, and the townsfolk are none too happy about it, so it’s lynching ahoy. Popping in to check out this little incident, Tool is bemused to grant the dying cow-fucker’s final, deranged wish. And what might that be? Why, to forever merge with the object of his adoration, resulting in a Cronenbergian mass of twisted flesh, part man, part cow, all horror. Once again, our story ends as the udder-loving freak’s warpath begins, leaving us to wonder just what the fuck could possibly come next. Well, we do get a taste...what would be the following scene is the cover to the goddamn book. Tool himself doesn’t even warrant a cover appearance on his own one shot, but Brundlecow? You bet your ass! I’ve spent the fewest words discussing this tale, because McDaniel spends the most, with Milk being the longest in the tome. Clearly, he was invested!

And that brings me to my final thoughts on the whole fetid affair...I still don’t really know anything about Adam McDaniel. Aside from a handful of other gigs around Northstar throughout the 90s, there simply doesn’t to be much of a footprint. Did he get headhunted by Marvel? Did he get headhunted for real? His laser-sharp art style might remind one of, say, a cross between Kyle Hotz and Tim Tyler, so he’s sure to have a lot of books under his belt and a cult following, right? Right?! This is where I start to grow worried. You see, McDaniel belongs to that gang of artists like Jim Somerville, Matt Roach, Jerry Beck, and the aforementioned Tim Vigil, guys with an insanely sharp black and white style, a clear love of Wrightson, and a realistic-yet-expressive style, that burst onto the indie scene in the 80s and 90s and made a huge scar on the horror scene. But that’s why the beads of sweat begin to form on my temples, my heart murmurs, and I feel that cold clench in my quivering rosebud. Matt Roach became a Bible-thumping loon, and dropped out of sight altogether. From what I hear, Somerville became an outright minister, and turned his back on comics entirely. Jerry Beck became a rabid anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist, and vanished from the public eye. Tim Vigil became one of the titans of the indie scene, and is still very much around...but he’s a xenophobic, anti-mask, alt-right asshole (aw, a sacred cow! Yeah, they’re fucking delicious medium rare). I truly hope that, whatever his fate, Adam McDaniel hasn’t joined the rest of his ilk, screaming about a recount somewhere, whilst carving passages from Ephesians into his chest. Maybe he’s just doing more square work these days, like graphic design, or portraits. Or maybe I’m just a dipshit, and didn’t realize he’s had a gig at DC or like 30 years.

Maybe...just maybe...he’s a part of Tool.

EPISODE 2: R.I.P. (TSR)

The figure that immediately draws your interest is the man in the business suit, staring with his one good eye back at you, his head emptied by the power drill still firmly lodged in what’s left of his brain. The fact that he’s holding a bandaged, grasping human torso like a brother-at-arms on a battlefield only intensifies the pull the hellish figure has on your helpless eyes. But try as those eyes might to hold on that striking, nightmare image, something else pulls at them, small and unassuming down in the corner. A little, blonde-haired boy of no older than five or six, head-to-toe in blue jammies. In one hand is a dead cat, held by the scruff of its neck. Tongue protruding, both sets of paws are bound with tape. In the boy’s other hand, is a baseball bat.

That there are other ghoulish figures populating the scene hardly seems to matter at this point. We’re in Hell. And it’s only the cover…

Welcome to R.I.P. (TSR, 1990), a ‘comics module’ from the fine folks who brought you the witch-hunt-inducing Dungeons & Dragons role playing game.

How this wholesome publication never instigated bonfires and overheated sermons is a mystery…I guess elves and orcs are more dangerous to the impressionable minds of our nation’s youth than pet-torturing toddlers and serial-killer-induced violence. Penned by Marv Wolfman (scribe of Marvel’s classic Tomb of Dracula), the curtain rises as our protagonist wakes up to find himself looking like he woke up on the wrong side of the butcher shop.

“It’s been about six minutes since the axe cleaved through the base of his neck and into his spinal column. The second chop sliced through the jaw, past the brain and out the other end. There wasn’t much pain. Death was instantaneous…problem was, … it wasn’t eternal.”

I’ve had a few hangovers like that.

 Yes, our protagonist starts the show dead…and it only gets worse from there. His first order of business is to stand up trying to get his bearings, only to spill his entrails to the floor. You know your day’s going to be bad when that’s your wakeup call.

From there, it’s an E - ticket tour through Purgatory and an unending parade of lost souls in various states of dismemberment and decay as our hollowed-hero tries to make sense of his ‘situation’, and discover who killed him…so he can exact a horrific revenge, and move on to his final rest. And, as these things tend to go, his search leads him to a cabal of murderous vampires in the process taking over the country from the inside out. 

But are they actually involved with the events surrounding his savage homicide?

 This comprises the first four-part After Death storyline, which plays like a cross between Fright Night Part II and the cadaverous hi-jinks of An American Werewolf in London, only from the perspective of the corpse.

After the initial storyline wrapped, it was followed by the multi-part Brasher storyline, a similarly-themed but less tongue-in-cheek tale of a young man murdered by a roving serial killer (prone to running large spikes into his victims’ heads) who seeks to put an end to the slaughter from beyond the grave. 

At one point, the spectral Brasher finally tracks down the isolated home of the murderer, seeping beneath the floorboards to discover a heap of rotting victims’ bodies beneath the cabin. This stark image left an indelible mark on your humble reporter in his youth, blood-chilling and fascinating all at once (one of the earliest glimpses at the true horrors of the world around us I can recall, and one that never left me).

 Mixed in with all this carnage were serialized backup stories like Junkyard Dog ( a great little nihilistic siege piece about a family trapped by a raging mutant canine threat that marked its territory with a stream of pure, caustic toxic waste), and built-in horror RPG scenarios to further the gaming tie-in (as was a common feature of all of TSR’s comics). This was a truly unique feature, and a killer addition to an already very worthwhile package.

 Bleak, morbid, gore-soaked and immersive, TSR’’s R.I.P. is a hidden gem worth rolling the dice on.

EPISODE 1: TALES OF THE DEAD (Visual Anarchy)

The living dead are everywhere these days…in our cineplexes, on our TVs, in our Xboxes, on the Miami beltway…and definitely in our comic bins.

But it wasn’t always that way.

In 1994, it was a far different world. It had been a few years since Romero had made a living dead picture, and it was a couple of years yet before Resident Evil hit the scene and changed the game. Zombies were not in the public eye, and they sure as hell weren’t in comic shops.

So it was quite the surprise when VISUAL ANARCHY Presents TALES OF THE DEAD emerged from out of the blue.

Written by Cry for Dawn co-creator Joe Monks, Tales of the Dead was intended to be an eight-issue mini-series that chronicled the fall of mankind to hordes of the hungry, hateful dead. While other comics of it’s kind had focused on a single (if fluctuating) group of characters on a single, long and horrifying journey. But Tales of the Dead took a different approach, that was and still is unique.

Told in three ongoing scenarios, it allowed the apocalyptic events to unfold from three separate viewpoints at once, with each one exploring different aspects of the dawning nightmare, and each one maintaining it‘s own distinct look and feel.

 In THE PARTY CRASHER (illustrated by Batman‘s Ed McGuinness), a pack of bikers camped out in the deep woods are barged-in upon one night by a mangled stranger. After biting up some of the members, the crazed individual is brutally put down, earning a roll through the campfire and a bullet through the brain for his actions. Only he was dead when he showed up…and he has no intention of staying down. Things go from bad to worse, as the area’s history as a dumping ground for a murderous local farmer comes back to haunt the present.

BIZARRE FUNERAL MARCH (illustrated by Tom O’Connor) opens in the wake of  a tragic bus crash that left forty-four citizens of a small community dead. In the wee hours of the morning before the town’s mass funeral, those forty-four dearly departed neighbors - along with their friends in the graveyard - return to their loved ones…with less than loving results.

As EARTHLY RUMBLINGS (illustrated by Chuck Regan) begins, a young couple with psychic abilities awaken to the feeling that something has gone terribly wrong. The feeling seems to emanate from a sprawling cemetery, out in the county…where the two arrive in time to feel the gate between life and death being violently pushed open.

The various serials come together to form a tapestry, of the Armageddon that’s being presented…with different elements and clues scattered throughout.

THE PARTY CRASHER hints at the horrifying notion that these zombies won’t necessarily go down with a headshot. BIZARRE FUNERAL MARCH paints a portrait of the dead full of hate, coming back to murder their “loved” ones, and murder them again when they come back as zombies. Earthly Rumblings treads into almost Fulci-esque territory, with hanged priests, gates to the other side, and a ‘prelude to Hell’ feeling of dread that points to the true weight of the horrors yet to come.

TALES OF THE DEAD ISSUE #2 features a standalone story called MUTATION (written and illustrated by Frank Forte and R. Murdock), that actually presents the situation from the zombie’s point of view. Taking place in a power-tool-strewn gallery of defiled human victims, it splatters across the page like a Cannibal Corpse album cover with a narrative, revolving around the slow torture of a human captive at the hands of a zombie with an almost racist hatred of the living.

Tales of the Dead was the dark and twisted beginning of a grand and hellish tale…but alas, what it was building up to, we may never know. Several schedule-crippling setbacks ultimately put Tales of the Dead into the grave after a mere two issues. A “Collector’s Pack” was released sometime after, a limited edition binder containing the two printed issues, a signed sheet of promo trading cards, and a mysterious diskette entitled “Sacrifice”…which crashed my computer when I finally got my hands on a copy a few years back. It’s contents remain a mystery.