Friday, October 28, 2005

Quick OEL Manga Reviews

War on Flesh, vol. 1
by Justin Boring, Greg Hildebrandy, & Tim Smith 3

The opening chapter of this GN--in which martial-arts monks take on a bunch of zombies--sounds like great high concept fun, but instead comes off as a pointless, confusing mess. Fortunately it gets a bit better in the later (mostly unrelated) chapters, as a desperate father make a deal with Evil Forces to bring his son back from the dead. The son, it turns out, is destined to become a key player in the enigmatic War on Flesh. It turns out to be a more-or-less competant story of voodoo zombies, and if that's your thing you may find War on Flesh enjoyable. But with other, better zombie comics out there, you can probably get your zombie fix elsewhere.

Rating: 2 (of 5)


I Luv Halloween, vol. 1
by Keith Giffen & Benjamin Roman

I Luv Halloween has a warped, twisted and dark sense of humor, centering around kids going trick-or-treating on Halloween and doing some Very Bad Things. There's Moochie, the young girl who dresses up as the Tooth Fairy, who finds a discarded brassiere and uses it as a slingshot and a garrote to kill two neighborhood bullies. She and her brother Finch live seemingly unsupervised in an abandoned house, with only the decaying corpses of the former occupants to keep them company. There's also Devil Boy, the kid who only shows up every Halloween to go trick-or-treating. And a zombie dog. Events spiral out of control into an evening of violence and blood and death. It's all rather well done, with appropriately twisted art from Roman and Giffen in his Lobo-esque ultrviolent humor mode, applied to kids who aren't quite old enough to understand the lack of morality of their actions. This book will definitely appeal to a certain type of reader, and if any of the events I described here sound interesting, then that type of reader is probably you. Conversely, if you're not that type of reader, you'll probably be best off staying far away.

Rating: 3 (of 5)

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