Edgar Allan Poe's Haunt of Horror No. 1
Marvel Comics/Max
When it comes to adapting prose to film, they say the book is always better—and it seems the same goes for adapting poetry to comics. In fact, the better the original writing is, the harder it is to adapt into any visual medium; what makes Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" a great poem, for example, isn't the imagery so much as the language.
So this new series from Marvel's adults-only line was probably doomed from the start. Taking the name of an old Tales From the Crypt-style anthology (even including a pun-spitting corpse host called "Uncle Deadgar"), it sets out to very loosely adapt three Poe poems into comics.
Visually, they're quite stunning, thanks to the artist involved, horror maestro Richard Corben, working in filmic black and white. The first two pieces—"The Raven" and "The Sleeper"—work quite well as little goth picture poems. The former is pretty faithful to the original; the latter envisions armies of cannibal ghosts and vampires feeding off the living. A more dramatic departure is "Conqueror Worm," which becomes a simple sci-fi O. Henry story.
Corben does reprint the original poems after each adaptation, so you can compare and contrast. It's a modestly classy move, which gives it slightly more literary value. Especially for any high-schoolers looking to the book as a sort of glossy Cliffs Notes.
Revere: Revolution In Silver No. 1
Alias Comics
Poe isn't the only 19th-century American poet inspiring modern horror comics. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" is the unlikely source of Revere: Revolution of Silver, in which Paul Revere rides not just to warn the rebels of the redcoats' approach, but to keep the colonies werewolf-free while he's at it.
Writer Ed Lavallee takes portions of Longfellow's poem, changing it where necessary (substituting "pigeons" for crows, in one line, for example) to narrate the story, which opens with Revere slaying a werewolf sired by a British soldier. As if their tea taxes and forced monarchy weren't enough—the English also had to oppress the colonists with lycanthropy!
Luckily Revere, being a silversmith, is in the ideal business to make silver musket balls and swords with which to slay the monsters.
The horror-movie tropes are pretty tired and the dialogue occasionally painful ("Eat silver, filthy beast!"), but it's a fun idea and an unusual setting for such a story. And Grant Bond's art, including a cool new visual take on the wolfmen, is top-notch.
Black Panther: Bad Mutha
Marvel Comics
When a superhero shares a name with a political movement, it probably shouldn't come as any surprise that it occasionally leads to some pretty political superheroics. Like the Black Panther, king of fictional African country Wakandia, using his government's resources to do something our own government couldn't do—help the poor, black people in New Orleans after Katrina struck.
That story is the climax of this new graphic novel collection from writer Reginald Hudlin (who previously tackled race and politics with Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder in Birth of a Nation), but the rest of the book is hardly a political treatise. While in the waterlogged Big Easy, Panther also fights vampires, which anyone who's read an Anne Rice novel knows the city is crawling with.
As the title suggests, Hudlin writes the Black Panther as if he were a 21st-century blaxploitation hero, and in this book Panther meets up with most of Marvel's other black heroes, many of whom could use some serious updating: Luke "Power Man" Cage, former Captain America sidekick The Falcon, vampire hunter Blade and, um, Brother Voodoo. Like the Panther, most of them started out decades ago as pretty embarrassing stereotypes but have come a long way since. Such a long way, in fact, that when one on-looker asks Falcon if they're going to start an all-black superhero team, it actually sounds like a pretty good idea (as long as they make Brother Voodoo think of a new name first).