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.
