Scream! and Misty - Halloween Special (2018)

Scream! and Misty - Halloween Special (2018)

Authors: Guy Adams / Rich McAuliffe / Alec Worley / Kek-W / Lizzie Boyle / Smuzz / Jordi Badia Romero | Artists: Frazer Itving / John Stokes / Steve Mannion / DaNi / Simon Coleby / Yishan Li / Smuzz / Jordi Badia Romero | Page Count: 52

"And thus sow the air with angels, subtle spirits bound to whisper spite in the ears of drowsing lords, waking men from apathy."

The Scream! and Misty pairing returns for a second Hallowe'en outing, once more resurrecting some old comic strips from their grave. There's seven stories included, but not all are from yesteryear.

It opens with The Thirteenth Floor, one of Scream!'s most popular strips. It continues the story of Max and Sam Bowers' partnership. The pairing theme continues with the strip's artists: John Stokes provides the B+W sections, while Frazer Irving takes over with full colour for the scenes set upon the titular floor itself.

There's not a lot of input from Max (not counting his creations), and the short page count doesn't help with characterisation of the other characters.

It feels like half a story, which is a criticism that can be applied to the majority of the book.

Next up is an origin story for new kid on the block Decomposition Jones, an undead P.I. with an oversized TCB belt buckle and a workable 1970s Blaxploitation edge. It's a decent first outing but I'm not convinced that the cartoony artwork was a good fit.

DaNi's art on Black Beth, on the other hand, is a perfect fit to the character. I didn't remember the strip from back in the day, but a quick internet search told me that it wasn't there. Instead, she first appeared in a Scream! Holiday Special in 1988, which is a magazine that I don't own. I've the '85, '86, and '89 (Spinechillers) specials, but not the '87 or '88 ones. Black Beth is a kind of Red Sonja-esque warrior, set in a sword and sorcery world of high-fantasy and adventure.

As a fan of Robert E. Howard's Conan it appealed to me, but it's not horror, per se, so feels a little out of place. Even so, it was my favourite part of the collection by a very wide margin. But what was going on with the closing page? It looked like an overly-compressed, enlarged JPEG.

Speaking of which, the magazine would've benefited from some proper QC. You could probably find many spelling and grammar errors on the 7th and Last blog, but this isn't my job, it's a hobby, one that I have to sometimes forcibly make time for alongside other interests and duties. If I was charging money for people to read my jibber-jabber, then I'd sure as hell pay someone who knows what they're doing to proofread it first. Rebellion ought to have did the same.

There's another Return of Black Max chapter that once again feels half-finished.

Misty's colourful Best Friends Forever is a self-contained story with a fun ending. It wasn't my favourite strip, but it's a perfect example of what an anthology magazine ought to have in it; i.e. a story that doesn't require a reader to wait twelve months before they can read the next part.

Mint Condition fits that brief, too, but it's got problems elsewhere, the least of which is the cut-and-paste nature of the art. It was written, drawn and lettered by one person, which I know is difficult, so respect earned for that, but it needed a few more rewrites before publication.

The collection ends with Bookworm, the tale of a selfish young woman named Joanie who wants to escape her chores and live in the kind of worlds she reads about in fiction stories. It's an entertaining idea with a proper final twist, but it's not something I'll want to revisit.

I've not had time to gauge how others felt about the 2018 Halloween Special, but my own feelings are that it has too many half-stories, was poorly QC'd, and may even have been hurriedly thrown together with little or no love from the person or team that assembled it.