Henson, Ken & O’Neill, Mark – The Haunt of Horace #1

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The Haunt of Horace #1

How seriously should one take a book that’s essentially a good-natured take on vampires and their daily life? On a very simple level this can be a fun comic, with a few good lines thrown in here and there and the wonderful concept of a vampire unicorn. But if you take any part of it too seriously, or even try to hold it up to basic logic, it falls apart. It’s only the first issue, so these things can be ironed out, but there was plenty not to like about this book. It’s the story of Horace, who moves with his vampire parents to a new town. There they find constant harassment and death threats, yet the concept of moving away is never mentioned. The parents seem to hate Horace, as they feed him crap for weeks at the start of the comic and are always punching him or trying to kill him in some way. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that he was bitten by a vampire bat and probably isn’t their real kid It was never explained, so who knows. Then there’s the vampire unicorn, a great concept that isn’t done well at all. Something about a flying horse that says “poop pee kill kill” doesn’t work as either a scary creature or a funny creature. How about the fact that there’s a mammoth pile of crap behind the plywood facade of their new house? Apparently vampires now live in crap, or at least love it enough to have a gargantuan pile of it behind their “house”. Or maybe this was a joke that just fell completely flat. My favorite scene, though, had to be when a group of kids tied Horace to a tree to torture him. They strip him, pull his pants down, we get a close-up of a kid about to do… something, then Horace crying, then it moves onto the next scene. So, um, was he scarred for life? Castrated? Meanly teased? Maybe I’m nitpicking at little things here, but there are so many nits to pick, and they all add up to a mediocre comic. At times the art is fantastic, and at other times it looks rushed and sloppy. Maybe things get a lot better from here on out (there’s already a second issue available), as there is certainly potential here, but you might want to wait until they get their act together before checking this out. $2.95