Summary
Cursed Comics Cavalcade offers a range of horror-tinged stories featuring DC’s stalwarts, but the tone and quality waver a little too much.
The first thing you notice about Cursed Comics Cavalcade, DC’s latest square-bound 80-page horror anthology comic, is the EC homage cover. With Batman being grabbed by the zombified corpse of his dad, the EC-style lettering and circle insets of other characters, this looks like a brilliant issue of Tales From The Crypt, straight from the vaults of EC Comics themselves. It’s an eye-catching piece of work that is instantly recognizable by any fan of the cult comic books of the past.
Inside we get 10 separate stories all featuring big names from the DCU: Swamp Thing, Batman, Wonder Woman, Guy Gardner, The Demon, Superman, Green Arrow, Black Lightning, Robin, and of course Zatanna, all have an entry here and the stories all have a horror edge to them. The stories are all 8 pages long and vary in style and content, and quality.
As is usual with such fare, there are some good and bad stories, but at least they are so short that if one tale doesn’t thrill you maybe the next one will.
There’s a cool looking Swamp Thing by Kyle Hotz, and a typically dark Batman yarn from Gary Dauberman that uses the format to its strengths. However, some of the stories just feel tonally out of place and feel like rehashed ideas that may have previously been rejected.
On the whole, this is a nice package, but with a $9.99 cover price, I think it’s one that maybe fans of the horror genre will pick up out of curiosity, and regular readers may avoid.
The much cheaper, and infinitely better Batman Damned was much lower in price, and perhaps a better Halloween special than this, but it will pass 30 minutes of your time and for my money, the cover is just great.
One for the die-hard fans that will appreciate the cover and perhaps a few of the stories.
