By Svetlana Fedotov
If you don’t know who Richard Corben is, you need to go back and retake Horror Comics 101. Luckily for you, I wrote the curriculum on horror comics, so I’ll fill you in. Corben is an artist who first cut his teeth on old horror rags from the sixties and seventies. With his unique art style and painful attention to detail, he quickly built a cult following, expanding further into the weird world of indy art, and became a regular contributor to Heavy Metal Magazine. As his fame grew, he began working on comic adaptations of famous authors, something he continues to this day, and between 1986 to 1994, even started his own publishing imprint and self-released his work. In short, he’s pretty damn bad-ass. Not one to retire anytime soon, he has recently hooked up with Dark Horse Comics and has been creating more fantastic famous story adaptations, this time going to back to his favorite horror writer, Edgar Allen Poe.
So, I’m not going to claim that I know all of Poe’s work and this is definitely a comic where my ignorance shines through. So while many of you have read these two stories, they are brand new to me and I’m going to describe them like they’re brand new to you too. The first story, titled Morella, is about a resentful husband who spends all his time cursing his wife, who he has grown to hate. Everyday, she spends hours playing with black magic and when her husband finally threatens to leave, she falls ill and dies. But before she goes, she warns that her daughter (his stepdaughter) will come to be his new wife. True to her word, the girl, named Orella, arrives, a spitting image of her mother. But who is she really and why is she deathly afraid of being called her mother’s name? The second, and better known, story is Murders in Rue Morgue about a grisly murder of a mother and daughter inside of a locked room. Though clues are vaguer than the lead detective when he solves the mystery, the answer leaves everyone shocked. SHOCKED!
One of the great things about this comic, especially if you’re a Corben fan, is that he really goes back to his roots. It’s been argued that some of his best work has been horror adaptations and it’s easy to see why. This is a man who understands the bizarre, underlying tones of a written horror story and manages to bring it to the forefront of his work. He’s got a passion for the Weird Tale genre that few have succeeded at with the type of precision that he has. This current title is a perfect introduction to his work as he attempts to bring another classic Poe story to life, one in a long line of Poe tales that he has done. The art is perfectly unsettling as his characters race down the filthy streets and back alleys of gaslight America, scrambling away from unnamed horrors and the creeping fingers of death and insanity. You can practically hear the crows call as the bell tolls for another victim of his sinister macabre. I know, it sounds so cheesy, but this comic is so perfectly Gothic, you’ll be popping in a tape of The Cure as you sip a glass of absinthe under the pale moonlight.
If you read this comic and are digging Corben’s style, he literally has decades of work for you to pilfer through. On top of his own work, his illustrations for Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella are easily available. He has also done work with the more lurid characters of Marvel and DC such as the Punisher and a five issue run on Hellblazer. This is a man who has been quoted as saying that he will work until he dies and at age 73, the proof is in the blood pudding. A master of his craft and a revolutionary in his own right, this is a guy no one can afford to miss.