Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
:: Sullengrey 4 issue mini series by Drew Rausch and Jocelyn Gajeway ::
by William the Bloody
Welcome to Autumn's Grove, a sleepy little town where weird stuff happens just below the surface. Not many people know about the odd happenings, but one man, Grey, know all too well. He's not like normal people. Grey is an anomaly, and because of this he was locked away; swept under the carpet so that society could plod on like "normal." Now he's out of the loony bin, but keeps to himself, choosing the company of his talking stuffed doll over real people. One night, Grey is on his way home through the cemetery when a girl taking photographs of the tombstones is attacked by a mad woman. Grey uses his odd abilities to kill the crazed woman, and he vanishes into the shadows, leaving the girl he saved shocked and bewildered. She becomes obsessed with not only who Grey was, but also what happened that night. She spends nearly twelve hours a day researching who he may be and where he came from, but what she finds will lead her to discover the frightening truth about the things that go bump in the night, and in particular, what Grey had stowed in his cookie jar...
The Good: Rausch's artwork is reminiscent of some crazy-spooky Jhonen Vasquez-FSc-Bill Sienkienwicz hybrid and it totally fits the atmosphere of the comic. The creepy graveyards, the removed limbs, the dripping entrails, it all looks cool-ass! Most of the dialogue is pretty keen, too. I really dig how Grey makes fun of looking goth-y most of the time ("I already told you that just because I wear black and enjoy a therapeutic brood now and again doesn't mean I'm Dracula.") Grey's scenes with the girl he rescues are well written.
The Bad: The art while very interesting and pretty, more often than not makes it hard to tell what exactly is happening some of the time. Even though I despise third person omniscient exposition boxes in comic, it seemed like they would have helped greatly in keeping the reader on track with what's going on. There were some apparent subplot strings (I'm not even SURE that's what they were) that I couldn't really fit in with the rest of story in my head, but they were more or less teasers for the ongoing series, I assume (this mini series ends with "the beginning", so I more or less drew my own conclusion that it is going to resume in a regular series or something...)
In the end, it was good, but confusing. I liked the pretty pictures, and the majority of the dialogue was fun and realistic, but most of the plot developments made no sense to me. Grey says he has a "condition" but we don't know anything more than that about him and why he was away and why he has weird powers or why it looks like there are zombies all over the place or not sometimes...? If you like eerie, spooky comics that lean to the super natural, you might get a kick out of this, otherwise, you'll probably be turned off and left scratching your head.
B
