House of Mystery Halloween Annual 2

I was looking for a ‘give it a go’ buy for the week, and this caught my eye. Pete Milligan, Mike Allred, some pretty art – yeah, surely worth a try.

Oh no it wasn’t. There’s a tolerably competent framing sequence by Matt Sturges and Luca Rossi, introducing a quartet of trick or treaters who were cursed 50+ years ago as kids to do this forever. This is overlong at ten pages, but it served as a reasonable and necessary intro, given that the quartet then appear in all the other stories.

The next is a Madame Xanadu story written by Matt Wagner and with rather lovely art by Brandon Graham which doesn’t fit with the four kids at all, as if the editor had given inadequate info to them (and creators on other stories) and worse, the story insists on giving all four tragic backgrounds of horrible abuse, before ending in a ‘we’ve run out of pages’ kind of way. Stories centring on child abuse need to be far less fatuous than this, and I say this as someone who liked Matt Wagner (good memories of drinking by a California pool with him and Ted McKeever and Bob Burden…).

The best of a lame bunch is a John Constantine story by Peter Milligan and Giuseppe Camuncoli. There’s not much to it, but it tells a decent little story of John’s youth. My one problem is that it feels like an ad for the current Hellblazer comic, since it levers in plotlines from that without sufficient need or explanation.

This tendency is far, far worse in the iZombie story following. Chris Roberson delivers a pointless and inconsequential space filler with admittedly excellent Michael Allred art, but its ending is not an ending of any real kind, just a claim for exciting stories in the regular mag – i.e. this is an advert, not a story.

The Mike Carey/Peter Gross Lucifer tale at the end does this more deftly, by having the quartet intersect with the fringes of what might easily be a big Lucifer story (I don’t read it, so I don’t know). It’s an entirely stupid and pointless story, but it is at least a more elegant solution than the other stories found to pimping their wares.

So much for Vertigo being about artistic integrity and all that, if anyone ever bought that anyway: this is a series of hacked out ads for their other titles (actually I didn’t even know there was a Madame Xanadu comic, but it’s at #28, so I guess it needs advertising), and I can’t imagine there is anything here that would make anyone buy any of them, if they weren’t already following the titles.