Werewolves: Call of the Wild No. 1
Moonstone
Some of the mystery is drained from this title by the fact that it's called Werewolves and features a big werewolf on the cover. This opening chapter, set in a small Nevada town on the road to Las Vegas, reads like a suspenseful B-movie neo-western, but when the mysterious stranger Cole Tyler rides up on his motorcycle, you'll probably have already figured out why he has such a good sense of smell and why it's so hard for a bar full of crackers to beat him up.
Thankfully, that gimme isn't the only little mystery that writer Mike Oliveri seeds the first issue with. Our hero Cole is looking for his brother—also a werewolf—who went missing, but was actually murdered by the sheriff. The sheriff is one of those annoying horror-movie sheriffs who wears sunglasses with reflective lenses, calls everybody "boy" or "sumbich" and knows more than he says. He seems to be in cahoots with a third werewolf, too, for some reason. It's not all about questions and small-town conspiracies though—artist Joe Bucco gets to cut loose on a climactic werewolf attack. Expect more monsters as the series continues.
Zombie-Sama
Narwain Publishing
If there's one genre of comics that is almost as overdone as superheroes these days, it's got to be zombie comics. At this point, the comics themselves are starting to resemble the monsters that star in them—lifeless, brainless, interchangeable and starting to stink.
So writer Billy Tucci and artist John Broglia's Zombie-Sama must be one hell of a good comic, because as sick to death as I am of zombie stories, I didn't mind reading theirs one bit.
Given how thoroughly explored the Night of the Living Dead-style zombie-apocalypse scenario has been in comics (and film) of late, there's bound to be elements that seem familiar (if not outright stolen) in any story going there, and Zombie-Sama's not without it's share, like a scene in which our hero foils zombies' sense of smell by stinking worse than they do (as was done in the reigning king of all zombie comics, Walking Dead) and another where a character has his hand lopped off to avoid going undead, a la Evil Dead.
Still, Tucci adds some neat innovations, including some rather clever usage of scuba equipment and a fun scene in which toothless, elderly zombies try gumming their victims. If Walking Dead is comics' answer to the nail-biting drama of Night of The Living Dead, then Zombie-Sama is comics' answer to cheeky lark Return of the Living Dead.
The Darkest Horror of Morella
Verotik
Glenn Danzig's vanity comics publisher, Verotik, has long been putting the whore in horror with its blood-and-bare-breasts comics, like Satanika. But in this two-story anthology book, the testosterone is washed away by a refreshing infusion of new blood.
The first Danzig-written story, "Morellas' Black Cat," is illustrated by prolific and popular Japanese artist and designer Junko Mizuno, whose instantly recognizable style is equal parts Lisa Frank and Sanrio cuteness, and bad-girl tattoo and flash art. Mizuno's big-eyed cuties and super-flat manga style seems completely contrary to Verotik's heavy metal aesthetic, which, of course, might be why it works so perfectly here.
The subversive element of Mizuno's art is just how cute she make any subject matter—bones, skulls, gore, torture, chopped meat—and Danzing's five-page story gives her plenty of opportunity to make the ugly cute. Sing-songy narration tells us all about the titular familiar of Morella, a buxom, horned sorceress who wears only a cape, garters and upside down crosses beneath her eyes. Every panel is a poster-perfect, J-pop masterpiece. Dead rats, eyeballs and satanic rituals never looked so darling.