Graphic Horror Novel Review – Thomas Ott - Cinema Panopticum

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2011 – Groth & Thompson – Spoiler alerts A strange unsettling horror comic drawn in black & white pencil, with no speech bubbles at all, capturing the mood of silent movie expressionist cinema. The five linked stories have shades of Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man collection. The connecting story features a young girl visiting a fair-ground, but she only has five coins on her and most of the rides and attractions are too expensive for her. However, she finds a booth with film viewing boxes, which cost a coin each, and she watches each of them one by one. A Mexican wrestler fights Death to the death and seems to win, but gets home to find his own child has died instead of him. Another coin shows a mad optician give a short sighted man hundreds of eyes growing out of his head like hair. A man goes to a hotel that seems strangely deserted but there is a meal laid out so he eats it and steals keys to a room, using the room for free. As he leaves, he sees the bodies of the other guests and hotel staff, and a giant cockroach preparing food just like he enjoyed eating. Another man has visions of the end of the World but when he is abducted by aliens he discovers that it wasn’t our World but another one. Finally the un-named girl realizes that she herself is in the last story, so she runs away without reading it – the machine shows her leaving the fairground frame by frame as she runs for her life. Scary and clever, though the science fiction UFO story seems out of place among the more Gothic horrors surrounding it. Arthur Chappell