Scream! Presents The Thirteenth Floor: Home Sweet Home (2019)

Scream! Presents The Thirteenth Floor:

Home Sweet Home (2019)

Author: Guy Adams | Illustrators: John Stokes / Vince Locke / Henrik Sahlström / Jimmy Broxton / Tom Paterson / Kelley Jones / Frazer Irving / Andreas Butzbach | Page Count 48

++ I was dormant too long. Rusty. Dusty. Musty. But not now. Now I'm better than I ever was. Sharp, shining, like a knife blade! ++

There's no Misty strips included this time, but in order to get the most from the Scream! only special you'll need to have read both of the previous Hallowe'en specials (2017 and 2018) because Home Sweet Home continues The Thirteenth Floor story begun in the relaunch.

There's three individual tales but they're all The Thirteenth Floor. The first of them is the one that the collection is named for, Home Sweet Home, and is both the longest (38 pages) and the one that continues from last year. It really benefits from the extra page length, enabling writer Guy Adams to devote multiple pages to some proper characterisation of people other than Max.

The mutually beneficial partnership of Max and Sam Bowers that provided the psychologically mixed-up electronic caretaker with fresh meat for his titular floor is beginning to break down.

Meanwhile, outside of Maxwell Tower, officer Hester Benedict is still determined to get to the bottom of the missing persons cases that seem to point to the high-tech tower block.

In what was for me the most engaging element of the work, Adams' narrative shows the home life of both the earnest officer and the troubled teen, using the personal problems of one to accentuate the problems of the other, making them perhaps not so different after all.

Regarding the nightmares that Max orchestrates, it would've made sense from a conceptional point of view to have each of the individual artists illustrate a different scenario, giving a unique, exclusive voice and colour to each sinner's bespoke punishment, but that isn't the case.

Instead, each artist gets a few pages to work with, sometimes within the same nightmare. It could be interpreted as showing how the horrific fantasies change in tone (because dreams and nightmares aren't bound by any kind of thematic logic), but more thought put into how best to use each of the artists' core strengths would've benefited the visual side of storytelling, I feel.

Although, related to that, I loved the nods to British culture of old; e.g. Tom Paterson's inclusion reminded me of D.C. Thomson's most famous weekly comic; the William Hartnell era of Doctor Who; and am I reading too much into it or was that a reference to a certain soap opera lady?

The second story, The Romantic, humorously credited to Scream! editor Ghastly McNasty himself, is a five page strip that's reminiscent of a 2000 AD Future Shock. It does well with what's mostly imagery alone (there's very little dialogue), but thereafter things are less fun.

The final story is good, too, but it's 100% reprint. It's the first ever The Thirteenth Floor strip, from the first ever issue of Scream! published by IPC Magazines in 1984. Attributed to author Ian Holland, it's actually Alan Grant and John Wagner co-writing under a pseudonym. Its inclusion could be deemed useful, I admit, but that's until you consider that Rebellion reprinted it already, just twelve months ago in The Thirteenth Floor: Vol 01 (2018) collected edition.

Reprinting the same strip in such a short space of time and charging fans for it twice is not a respectful thing to do. I'm guessing that the people who bought the earlier publication make up a very large percentage of the number who bought the 2019 Halloween special, and I'd be very surprised if Rebellion hadn't come to that same conclusion also. They deserve nothing less than to be taken to Maxwell Tower and introduced to Max; he makes special time for wrongdoers.

In conclusion, the first strip is an excellent continuation, but (yet again) it makes me envision the higher ups at Rebellion as penny-pinching trolls, spitting chicken bones as they laugh at comic fans. As I type this I'm also picturing starving writers and artists being thrown scraps of what's left from the table, while they fear for creative freedom and mourn the loss of another IP.

It's £4.99 for 48 pages, Pages 1 to 43 are new story; pages 44 to 47 are reprint; page 48 is an advert for the collected edition that I mentioned above, so you can have your reprint twice!