House of Mystery
I grew up reading comic books. I’d read whatever my mom happened to have around the house, which tended to lean toward Archie, but there was a lot of the more grim stuff hiding in there, too. Somewhere we got lots of Sgt. Rock, World at War, House of Secrets, and House of Mystery. So I had quite the healthy dose of violence and horror at a fairly tender age.
I really loved those old stories. Those old horror comics have definitely had an impact in my film and book preferences outside of comics. I was a little taken aback when the House of Secrets title was revived but not the concept. I liked the book and have pretty much the whole thing in issues, but it seemed a little upsetting to not see Abel playing the host. So, this year at Wizard World Chicago when I saw the first issue of House of Mystery I braced myself for a similar shock. And it never came. Right there on page one was Cain. Granted, Cain a la Neil Gaiman (hell, the last image of Cain on page two looks a whole lot like Gaiman) in The Dreaming, but Cain nonetheless. And then, the important part, the series is a collection of fairly creepy stories. The stories are all loosely connected using a similar motif to what Gaiman used in Sandman: World’s End. And running through the book is the story of a young woman dreaming of Cain’s missing house, which is really the thread that binds the whole series to gether.
I still only have issue 1 of the series, and issue 4 came out just last week, so I’m a little behind. Bear in mind that I’m only talking about the first issue here. The whole thing could have gone to hell in the last few months, I don’t know.
I’m glad that Vertigo never really fell for the fashion of highly rendered comic pages with complicated color seperations and gradients. I have never picked up an afinity for that style. Perhaps it’s the sentimentalist in me, but I like the colors to have edges. I like it when the shadow is clearly delineated from the highlight. Of course, that is just a taste thing, but I like my comic art to feel like comic art, not something that really wants to be an oil painting.
The art itself is very clean and tidy, while still having a certain looseness to it. I see a fair amount of Tim Sale’s influence on Rossi’s artwork, which is definitely a compliment. But Rossi’s figures aren’t quite as simplified as Sale’s. There is also a freedom in the brush strokes present here that Sale tends to shy away from. (And I’d almost put money on Rossi using a brush to do the art.)
Most of the book is part of the arc setting up the bar in the dreaming where the storytelling takes place. The story that is presented is a rather grim tale called “The Hollows” about a bride and her giant fly husband. This tale is certainly grim enough to have come straight out of the original House of Mystery. Bill Willingham’s art here is quite the counterpoint to the story proper and truly sets the tone that the teller is truly as naïve as she seems to present herself in the pub. His art is filled with muted colors and the human figure is soft and rounded in such a fashion that almost screams of her innocence, and creates an elegant balance against the brutally grim nature of the story.
The idea of a small piece of my childhood returning to print is something I initially encountered with trepidation, but it looks like Vertigo is going to stick with the old format and that makes me incredibly happy. House of Mystery promises to be something a little different from what’s currently available out there, while sticking to a known, and loved, format for short storytelling.
