Halloween Reads: Alex de Campi's and Jerry Ordway's Semiautomagic, de Campi's Grindhouse

For Hallowe'en, I'm recommending some spooky reads and views as time permits. First up are the comic books, Semiautomagic and Grindhouse: Doors Open at Midnight Volume One: Double Feature.

Semiautomagic by Alex de Campi and Jerry Ordway

Cover art by Jerry Ordway.
Copyrght 2016, Dark Horse Comics.

I have been a fan of Jerry Ordway's artwork and writing since I was a teenager devouring Superman titles. Ordway has worked for a prodigious number of DC Comics titles, including Crisis On Infinite Earths. He also wrote and shared the art duties on the 47-issue run of The Power of Shazam!. In particular, I followed Ordway's run on Adventures of Superman and his contribution to the Superman in Exile story arc. So, for me, finding Semiautomagic was a golden discovery.

Here, Ordway gets to draw interdimensional Lovecraftian beasties and monsters of all varieties. His attention to detail, his line work, are masterful. Jerry Ordway remains one of the most criminally underemployed comic-book artists of today, but I digress.

The story concens heroine Alice Creed, a modern-day warlock. Alice, a Jack-Constantine-esque rogue with a penchant for hard drinking and tortorous self-doubt, is locked in an ongoing struggle with otherworldly foces. The problem is, Alice Creed is human. She makes mistakes, and when she does, innocents die. Like a private detective's flaws add layer to a classic P.I. story, Creed's humanity brings texture to this character-driven series. Alice fights all sorts of nasties using occult magic, opening up beautiful opportunities for twisted and phantasmagoric artwork, and testing her conscience and her fallibility.

The author, Alex de Campi, also a filmmaker, writes manga, mystery suspense and young adult-themed comics such as No Mercy, which was once an ongoing Image Comics book. Moreover, what piqued my interest was reading that de Campi is a woman who writes horror comics. I repeat - a woman who writes horror comics. Hearing that moniker, I was almost won over already. In a field often dominated by men, I was delighted to learn the byline "Alex" was that of a woman.

And I was vindicated in reading her because de Campi has the chops for horror. She puts Alice through the ringer, and does not relent. The author also knows how to play with horror tropes, particularly the codes of occult magic, revitalizing them so that while the story feels familiar, it also feels fresh and relevant. The story takes heady inspiration from H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulu mythos and Hellblazer comics (the aforementioned John Constantine's long-runing title) to name some influences. Semiautomagic also has great timing, coming soon after DC Comics relaunched the John Constantine character as part of the New 52 reboot and giving readers a lighter, diluted version of  a chain-smoking, nihilistic, aged-in-real-time British street mage.

Semiautomagic is so pleasurable that I am re-reading it. My only qualms are minor. Alice Creed has a masochistic streak, a facet of her personality hinted at but not fully developed. I suspected she was a cutter or suffered a pain-inducing sickness, but could not draw a firm conclusion aside from her self-medicating with hard liquor, an employed trope of the hard-boiled detective that still works well regardless in this context. As well, because this series appeared as a serial in the monthly Dark Horse Presents, the story moves along at a fair clip with very little room to breathe. It ends abruptly. When I finished reading Semiautomagic, it felt like having a fling with somenoe, and a rather amazing fling at that. You want to see them again afterward. But there's only one problem; they didn't leave you their phone number. 

If I find any more of Semiautomagic or Alice Creed out there, anywhere, I will snap the book up.

Copyright 2014, Dark Horse Comics.

Grindhouse: Doors Open at Midnight Volume One: Double Feature
by Alex de Campi and Chris Peterson

de Campi has the requisite chops to make great horror and exploitative comics, as I discovered in her Grindhouse double feature. 

Grindhouse, in fact, is also fine spooky reading in the spirit of the grindhouse and exploitative flicks of the 1970's and 1980's. I've read the first two trades, which are shamelessly violent, sexy, sleazy, and horrifc. Reading Grindhouse, you feel like you are at the drive-in. You can almost hear the crickets sawing their legs, smell the popcorn, the sickly sweet pop, the summer air, the hint of marijuana and beer drifting over from other cars at the show. Each story in this anthology format is charmingly presented as a different short film. In other words, Grindhouse is great fun, in fact much more fun than many films out there now, particularly in the horror genre. There are several collected trades out of Grindhouse there that are on my to-read list.

Luckily, neither of the above books is tied to a Halloween theme, so you can read them year-round for an excellent dose of comic-book horror.