Michael Hicks's Reviews > EC Epitaphs from the Abyss Vol. 1

DNF @ 49%

EC Epitaphs from the Abyss Vol. 1 serves as a perfunctory reminder of why short horror comic stories rarely work well for me. Given the condensed format of multiple stories, usually three or four, per issue, the writers and artists are provided an extremely narrow window in which to tell their stories. In only a handful of pages, their task is to give us a world, a setting, and characters we're supposed to become familiar enough with to care about and shocked or appalled when everything goes sideways. And it's in this remit where things usually fall apart for me, since it's hard to care much for somebody who has only existed for a few sparse panels before the meet their grisly end, or for the rules of the horrifying world they exist in to be established.

Take, for example, the lead story in this collection, "Killer Spec." Written by J. Holtham, with art by Jorge Fornés, it starts off well enough with its exploration of a narcissistic writer who turns to murder in a fit of jealousy, but falls apart with its inexplicable ending. The climax revolves around his victim returning from the dead, but due to the brevity of the piece there’s no exploration or explanation for the how or why of this sudden reanimation beyond this being a horror story and so of course something like this has to happen. It’s accompanied by meta commentary from the victim about how a story’s ending should feel both inevitable and surprising, and exactly the right thing, but Holtham’s scripting fails to capture any of these requirements. Is this a world where the dead routinely return? Did this occur by magic, or is it a fluke? We have no way of knowing. The crux of the story occurs simply because it’s what is expected to occur, logic or reason be damned.

Chis Condon's “Senator, Senator” proves to be a bit more compelling with its look at conservative politics and its cultish ideals as a reporter who has seen it all decides to dig into a Republican senator’s shifting viewpoints on abortion. Unfortunately, the remaining two stories in issue one didn’t do much for me at all, with one exploring a father’s impossible decision to kill one of his family members after being forced at gunpoint. Brian Azzarello's "Us vs Us" succeeds in being provocative, but its messaging is sloppily handled with its twisted “both sides” look at pro- and anti-vaxxers, questioning who the real monsters are here.

The second issue doesn't fare much better aside from Tyler Crook's "Gray Green Memories" and Jason Aaron's "Sounds & Haptics." The first centers around a zombie who has been standing in a grocery store aisle for an indeterminate amount of time, but who knows they had come here from something. Aaron takes a look at the consequences of driving while distracted, as a phone addicted teen undergoes some vigilante surgery in the aftermath of a car accident.

While these two short pieces are nicely done, they didn't do much to convince me to stick around for the back-half of this collection. Taken as a whole, this trade collection has so far, unfortunately, been the very definition of mediocrity.