Broken Frontier

Just in time for Halloween, Jazan Wild’s Funhouse of Horrors #1 is now available to download for free from the company’s home website!

Jazan Wild – the musician whose first comic series, Carnival of Souls recently underwent a shift from UK publisher Markosia Comics to its own independent imprint (Carnival Comics) – is back with a book nearly as good as his premiere series. The new book follows Jacob, a boy who stumbles upon a Halloween-style haunted house oddly sequestered deep within the woods. He’s given a book of seeming fiction by the old man who works there, and is captivated by the tome’s tales of death, murder, and massacre. By the time the next day dawns, Jacob begins to hear voices, voices of the very dead he’d read about in the book! Desperate for a cure, Jacob returns to the house, and then the real horrors begin….

Offered as an absolutely free download at Jazan Wild’s website (see the end of this review for the link), this is an opportunity no horror book fan can pass up. Not only is Funhouse of Horrors a fun as hell read with eye-popping art and a sincerely intriguing story, but as a complete give-away freebie it’s an offer that fans of IDW and Viper Comics and BOOM! Studios should lap right up with gleeful abandon. Wild is a relative unknown to most comic book buffs, though anyone lucky enough to have picked up copies of the first Carnival of Souls from Markosia knows that he can write one wicked-mean tale. Though while COS was scripted by X-Files writer Stefan Petrucha, FOH is penned entirely by Wild himself, with a final result that’s not quite as smooth as Petrucha’s, but which makes up for this fault by tossing in sheer enthusiasm for the medium and the genre.

Basically, Funhouse of Horrors is structured to be one giant-sized nod to the EC/Tales From the Crypt style horror books of yesteryear, only without any absolute narrator/crypt-keeper per se. Jacob narrates most of the book, although the big Mr. Scratch himself seems to be the motivating, storytelling force behind the larger arc of the goings-on. It’s actually a bit of a beast to describe this book, as – and this mirrors the same style of gradual revelation that Carnival of Souls utilized – the story of Jacob only hints toward a much larger scheme of stories to come. There are numerous story points that, by the end of issue #1, simply aren’t clear, and which in and of themselves don’t make a lot of sense. Basically, while on one hand the story does come to a close, it isn’t much of a finish, and seems to more suggest that something much larger has only just begun, making the book a lot more exciting and enticing than your average horror mag, though a bit of a letdown compared to the usual one-shot horror stories comic readers are more accustomed to.

Outside of this odd, somewhat dangling ending, though, the writing of FOH is top notch, and Wild has a gay old time writing in a mixture of modern and archaic narrative story styles. The pacing of the tale is pitch-perfect, with plenty of surprises as well as familiar sequences of old-school, short horror tale structure (man finds strange thing, strange thing at first seems good, strange thing is catalyst for even stranger things, horror peaks and a solution is desperately sought for – sound familiar?). If you aren’t a big fan of the cheesier aspects of horror yarns, of sentences that evolve into egregiously oversized all-caps ("I didn’t just read it…I FELT IT!"), if you aren’t a fan of 2000AD strips from the 80’s or Creepshow or the aforementioned Tales From the Crypt, then this book won’t be for you. If you like any of the above, however, then FOH is just about the best damn cheap-thrill horror book to come out this year.

The art by Carlito Zuniga and David Miller is also a sight to behold. The two are fantastic together (I never even realized there were two different artists until I finished, went back to the beginning, and read the credits). Their styles are both highly detailed and fluid, reminiscent of Todd McFarlane and his craziest or CreeD’s Trent Kaniuga. The free download book is only in black and white (there’ll be an additional full color edition available come Christmas), but neither Zuniga nor Miller suffer from such a deficit; their lines are all perfectly at home in a color-less world, the action dynamic, the figures finely delineated, and the entirety of the book quite frankly gorgeous to look at.

For anyone looking for a straight-up blast of a horror mag, you can’t go wrong with a quality work like Funhouse of Horrors. And, hell, this first issue is free so what’ve you got to lose? The story won’t get really good until the later issues it seems, but at least everyone can take a look and decide for themselves without a single penny down. Now repeat after me: "Thank you, Mr. Jazan whoever-you-are! We love you!"

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For more information on Jazan Wild, Carnival Comics, and to download your FREE copy of Funhouse of Horrors #1, go to http://www.jazanwild.com