Doc Macabre 1

Doc Macabre is a slight but nonetheless entertaining comic from the team of Steve Niles and Berni Wrightson.

Here’s the premise: Doc Macabre is a lycra-clad, goggle wearing geek-for-hire who battles zombies, ghosts or whatever particular monster in the vicinity he’s paid to deal with. His headquarters are a rather sedate house that backs onto a gargantuan warehouse where he’s attended to by his robot manservant. Here he develops an array of unlikely-looking technological gadgets, none of which work exactly as he intends them to. Almost child-like in his enthusiasm, he’s intelligent, nerdy and also somewhat inept – his victories are as much due to luck as to any inherent skill he possesses

Steve Niles is a solid but sometimes uninspiring writer whose concepts aren’t quite matched by his ability. He struck lucky with 30 Days of Night, and the success of that series has allowed him the indulgence of attracting big name artists who would otherwise be working in more lucrative fields. This is one of his better efforts. Only nominally a horror comic, the storyline is played for laughs and the humorous aspects are neatly handled, though hardly subtle (requesting payment by credit card after seeing off an attack of zombies. The ghost of a naked man haunting a Psycho-style house). Along the way there are a few neat narrative tricks as the plot veers away from the present to focus on Doc Macabre’s past.

The real attraction though is Berni Wrightson’s art. There’s nothing new on show here, but there are very few artists that draws a festering corpse better. In many ways, the comic seems geared around his interests – sci-fi gadgets, monsters, graveyards, large, gothic houses, humorous, slightly grotesque characters. It’s not peak-period Wrightson – that’s the man who gave us ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘Frankenstein’ – but it’s not the throwaway work he’s produced for Marvel and DC at times either. Looking through it, I was struck by how superb his use of shifting viewpoints is, how they control and lead the reader into the storyline, and I wonder how much less a comic this would be without his craft and guiding vision.

This is obviously just a snippet of the no-doubt forthcoming and more substantial graphic novel. As such, it ends rather abruptly, and awkwardly. Still, it’s an entertaining enough read, and while I probably won’t pick up subsequent issues, I’d be tempted to pick it up in its collected form.