Graphic Content: Breath of Shadows by Rich Douek and Alex Cormack

 

Scott McAdams famously said in his book Understanding Comics that graphic novels were a medium, not a genre. He furthers this distinction by reminding readers that the graphic novel is simply a different medium, like books and television, to tell a story. That said, when graphic novels are used to tell horror stories, there must be two elements considered to fully utilize the graphic medium: the story and the pictures that tell the story. One such example of this is Rich Douek and Alex Cormack’s Breath of Shadows.

Shadows takes place in the 1960’s and Jimmy Meadows seems to have it all. His band The Shades have achieved international stardom, and their latest album just went gold, but Jimmy has a powerful addiction that threatens to ruin his and his bandmates' careers. With his bandmates fed up and Jimmy wanting to live for something other than his next fix, he and his crew travel with a group of explorers into the jungles and lost temples of South America to discover a cure for Jimmy’s addiction. This is definitely a story where the proposed cure could potentially turn out to be worse than the disease.

Much like their previous collaborations Sea of Sorrows and the award-winning Road of Bones, this book shows both writer and artist pooling their talents to create something horrifyingly harmonious. Writer Douek does not portray Jimmy and the other members of his party as likable people. They all have an assortment of addictions and agendas that turn out to be quite self-destructive. That said, readers aren’t really meant to like these people; it’s much more fun to watch a group of jerks walk slowly and steadily into a trap before seeing their horror as they realize that the trap has snapped shut. Artist Cormack shows an affinity for drawing skin-crawling horrors, an adjective that is all too appropriate. The visceral and disconcerting artwork just might have you scratching at your skin as you try to convince yourself there is nothing crawling on or beneath your skin. Douek and Cormack have once again created something more frightening than the sum of its parts and Shadows is recommended for horror lovers who don’t mind squirming in their seats.

New Arrival: Ghost Eaters by Clay Mcleod Chapman

 Ghosts have haunted everywhere from spooky, gothic houses to IKEA-like stores and fast food restaurants, but where these restless spirits ultimately reside is in the human mind. The people who encounter these insubstantial spirits also bring along their own substantial baggage, whether it be fears, skepticism, or one of the most powerful and painful aspects of the human condition: grief. Fewer still are the people who actively expose themselves to the potential physical and mental trauma of a haunting, but that’s exactly what the people in Clay Mcleod Chapman’s Ghost Eaters do in their quest to “get haunted.”

Erin chooses to get haunted because she just lost her on-again, off-again boyfriend and would do anything to get answers. She discovers those answers in Ghost, a drug that allows its users to see ghosts. Soon, this drug is spreading beyond the borders of their home city of Williamsburg, but Erin has her own problems. As she becomes more and more addicted to Ghost, eager to finally make contact with her boyfriend, Erin soon finds herself in a spiritual hole from which she might be unable to free herself.

While there are many stories that tackle the attachment ghosts have to the living from the spirit’s perspective, a sort of magic bullet that sends the ghost “into the light,” it is rare that a story looks at how the living attract ghosts. The fact that this drug not only lets people see ghosts but draws ghosts toward them is perhaps the greatest metaphor for how one’s inability to move on from a loved one’s death is keeping them haunted. As Erin goes deeper and deeper into her use of Ghost, isolating herself more and more from the living, Chapman reveals a more surreal universe than what is hinted at during the beginning of the story. More than just a run-of-the-mill ghost story, Ghost Eaters is a meditation on grief and how it can pull us away from the living if we’re not careful, that we should “get haunted” at our own risk.