King Diamond: Abigail (2022)

King Diamond: Abigail (2022)

Author: Dan Watters | Illustrator: Damien Worm | Page Count: 120

'Perhaps it was the reduction of the world to simplistic concepts of good and evil that revolted me.'

A comic book adaptation of Danish artist King Diamond's 1987 concept album of the same name, about a couple who inherit a mansion with ghosts, wherein the influence of a stillborn child lingers, having outlived her flesh.

Sadly, there's nothing inside the covers to say how much input King actually had in its creation. Hopefully it was more than a simple nod of the head in agreement to the project being undertaken by someone else.

The credited author is Dan Watters, a British writer with various video game adaptations on his CV and the man who was chosen to helm the relaunch of DC/Vertigo's Lucifer series. All things considered, he did a fine job keeping it respectful while filling in the story's gaps.

It begins with a quote from William Blake's The Clod and the Pebble, which first appeared in Songs of Experience (1794). It's a short work that explores the nature of love through two seemingly opposing views. It reads as follows:

Love seeketh only self to please, To bind another to its delight, Joys in another's loss of ease, And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite.

Interestingly, the stanza chosen is the one that on the surface appears to deal with the negative aspects of such feelings, but Blake was a master of subversion and deeper meaning and quite often what seems to sit in opposition can be seen to also function as support, and vice versa. In that respect, its relevance to the story of Abigail will be clear to anyone who's studied Blake. For those that haven't, however, it has relevance later, so isn't the oddity that it may seem initially.

While it's of course possible to read the book without having knowledge of the original album's story, it's definitely written for fans that do know it well. I'm in that latter category.

After a grisly opening scene revealing an event that occurred decades before the time of the book's main story, it shows the arrival of a doctor named Jonathan La Fey and his lover Miriam Natias to their new dwelling, in the year 1845. Besides the absence of a 'summer rain', it's as it was described in King's lyrics: by coach to a valley where 'crossroads meet' and 'where all darkness seems to grow'. The last part is the only one that requires any great skill from the artist because it applies to mood and tone, not just lines on a page arranged in a competent way. Capturing 'tone' is a skill that not every artist is proficient in, so I was glad to see that Damien Worm very much was - his work is thick with atmosphere and heavy with suggestion.

Worm's palette of blacks and blood reds — such as those used during the prelude, in which a group of determined horsemen perform an immoral deed in the name of God — really suit the timbre of the story. And later, the candlelit reds, browns, and purples that echo the Poe-esqe malady of torturous human thoughts are fantastic. It's a great shame, then, that the printing is so damn dark. It's as if someone has turned the brightness down on a television, making it difficult or impossible to discern details in backgrounds, etc. Such complementary artwork to a darkly-themed script is a joy to see in visual media, but it's wasted if it can't be seen properly.

Another downside is that Worm's beautiful pencil lines are too often smothered under the dark inks. I'd love to have seen more of those shining through in certain relevant scenes/panels.

It has a few grammar errors, but not an inordinate amount when compared to every other modern era comic that I've read recently; mostly it's things that cheap autocorrect software might overlook, but a properly trained human would spot; e.g., unusual proper nouns misspelled and 'too' in place of 'to'. Cost cutting has its pitfalls, but the presentation suffers in other ways: more than once the positioning of dialogue and imagery where two pages meet ruined the experience, making it completely unreadable in the first case, and in the latter compromising the power of what's arguably the book's most gruesome scene in a two-page spread.

In retrospect, it's possible that such issues are present in the glued paperback version only, which is what I own. If the hardback version uses sewn binding, it would allow adjoining pages to be opened more freely. That's assuming the hardback is actually sewn, I've not seen it up close, but either way it speaks to a lack of foresight from at least one person during production.

As it stands, it's an excellent interpretation of the album, lessened in its dramatic power by some production issues that could've easily been sorted out prior to publication. If they had been, then I'd have enjoyed the book even more than I did. If it sells enough units, maybe it'll encourage Z2 Comics to seek permission for an adaptation of Abigail II (2002), hopefully with the same author and artist pairing. The sequel's story is arguably more ludicrous, but I'd certainly give it a chance.