A potentially promising revival that nevertheless lacks the piquancy and verve of its pulp horror predecessors.

I’m a firm believer in critiquing things, particularly things I enjoy. I don’t think criticism is a dirty word and I think half of the fun of engaging with a piece of media is picking it apart. It’s how I get my kicks and it helps me understand the book, movie, show, etc. better.

This was one of those offerings that did itself no favors by explicitly comparing itself to its inspirational source material. The style is there and you can certainly see the similarity to Tales from the Crypt and other horror comics, but it ultimately falls flat where others succeed. Some stories were engaging, but overall this collection left me with a distinctly unsatisfied feeling. Think decaf coffee at 6am or a thin soup for Thanksgiving dinner.

Having mulled it over I think there are a few obvious reasons for this underwhelm, this complete and utter lack of whelm in what should be a shocking, overwhelming horror comic.

One is the title itself. If your comic is called “Epitaphs from the Abyss” (not the snappiest title it has to be said) and your ghoulish narrator is called The Grave Digger, there had better be some gosh darned epitaphs on some graves! There should be *at least one* for each collection, ideally more. The Grave Digger (whose conceptually design is solid, a more grotesque Uncle Sam) should be absolutely fiending to carve pitch black inscriptions on every available surface. We should have to physically restrain this man from chiseling ironic one liners on funereal stone.I need Crypt Keeper level puns etched into granite at the end of every grizzly tale! The absence of anything approaching this truly baffles me. I mean, why make it your title and the function of your all important narrator character if you’re not going to do anything with it? There is ONE epitaph on ONE grave “She died as she lived, alone”, and that’s all we get. I don’t even think it’s tied to a specific story and it's not even particularly ironic or dark.

Another issue I have is the morality, or lack thereof, from this collection.

I know, complaining about morality in a horror comic, but look, hear me out.

Part of what made the original EC publications work was that they possessed a messed up but consistent moral throughline. Horrible, over the top, gruesome things happened, sure, but most often to people who deserved it. Most of the shocking deaths had an ironic, vengeance heavy, Old Testament Justice bent to them. And this was everywhere, the Tales from the Crypt show and the Twilight Zone, work partially because we want to see what horrible thing will happen to the nasty character of the week. Now I’m not saying every story has to have that or that bad things can’t happen to good characters in horror, not by any means. But it does help with stories in this format and seeing the absence of it really doesn’t work for me.

For instance, in the story The Perfect Pearl, a couple’s dreamy love story takes a nightmarish turn when the wife, Polly, discovers that everytime she displeases her increasingly demanding husband Hank, her signature pearl necklace shrinks, choking her. That’s a wonderful concept and a great image, I absolutely loved this set up. Eat your heart out June Cleaver. But the ending completely lost me. The wife discovers that being the ideal 50’s housewife causes the necklace to grow and give her more breathing room. So she does just that and keeps it up for sometime, causing her necklace to grow and grow until one night she hangs herself with it.
If that ending sounds like a bummer it's because it is. This smart, determined woman doesn’t get her revenge, she doesn’t get freedom, her only escape is suicide and nothing happens to the husband who caused it all. In another, older, horror comic, Polly would find a way to flip the tables, to get the necklace on her evil husband and Hank would get some sweet, bloody, horror comeuppance. Or maybe Hank’s own devious plan would backfire, causing his death in some gruesome, unforeseen way. Pretty much any ending would have worked better for this story than the one we got.

Now, to be perfectly fair to Epitaphs from The Abyss, examples of this dark morality do occur in its pages. In Sounds and Haptics, a driver, distracted by texting, gets his hands cut off by a crazed nurse, the only survivor of the other car he hit. And in Family Values, a man bets on whether or not a family turns on each other and ends up a victim of the same twisted game on the last page. It’s just that in general this isn’t pulled off as well as in earlier comics and in other cases is completely absent where it could have added value to the story.

I realize this all sounds like a lot. I didn’t hate this collection, the art was stunning and I genuinely enjoyed some stories, Blood Type and A Crossroads Repetition, especially. My high level of criticism comes from the sense that this collection didn’t deliver on its implicit promise. At every turn it compares itself to its much better forebears. It mimics the style adeptly but lacks, and in some cases betrays, the spirit and substance of the original. Riverdale’s “Tales in a Jugular Vein” did a better homage to the golden age of horror comics. Their narrator “The Key Keeper” is a creepy old janitor with a ring of keys that open the doors of different tales. The stories themselves are tongue in cheek at times, darkly ironic, and actually engage with and critique themes from the original comics they’re referencing.

DNF @ 49%

EC Epitaphs from the Abyss Vol. 1 serves as a perfunctory reminder of why short horror comic stories rarely work well for me. Given the condensed format of multiple stories, usually three or four, per issue, the writers and artists are provided an extremely narrow window in which to tell their stories. In only a handful of pages, their task is to give us a world, a setting, and characters we're supposed to become familiar enough with to care about and shocked or appalled when everything goes sideways. And it's in this remit where things usually fall apart for me, since it's hard to care much for somebody who has only existed for a few sparse panels before the meet their grisly end, or for the rules of the horrifying world they exist in to be established.

Take, for example, the lead story in this collection, "Killer Spec." Written by J. Holtham, with art by Jorge Fornés, it starts off well enough with its exploration of a narcissistic writer who turns to murder in a fit of jealousy, but falls apart with its inexplicable ending. The climax revolves around his victim returning from the dead, but due to the brevity of the piece there’s no exploration or explanation for the how or why of this sudden reanimation beyond this being a horror story and so of course something like this has to happen. It’s accompanied by meta commentary from the victim about how a story’s ending should feel both inevitable and surprising, and exactly the right thing, but Holtham’s scripting fails to capture any of these requirements. Is this a world where the dead routinely return? Did this occur by magic, or is it a fluke? We have no way of knowing. The crux of the story occurs simply because it’s what is expected to occur, logic or reason be damned.

Chis Condon's “Senator, Senator” proves to be a bit more compelling with its look at conservative politics and its cultish ideals as a reporter who has seen it all decides to dig into a Republican senator’s shifting viewpoints on abortion. Unfortunately, the remaining two stories in issue one didn’t do much for me at all, with one exploring a father’s impossible decision to kill one of his family members after being forced at gunpoint. Brian Azzarello's "Us vs Us" succeeds in being provocative, but its messaging is sloppily handled with its twisted “both sides” look at pro- and anti-vaxxers, questioning who the real monsters are here.

The second issue doesn't fare much better aside from Tyler Crook's "Gray Green Memories" and Jason Aaron's "Sounds & Haptics." The first centers around a zombie who has been standing in a grocery store aisle for an indeterminate amount of time, but who knows they had come here from something. Aaron takes a look at the consequences of driving while distracted, as a phone addicted teen undergoes some vigilante surgery in the aftermath of a car accident.

While these two short pieces are nicely done, they didn't do much to convince me to stick around for the back-half of this collection. Taken as a whole, this trade collection has so far, unfortunately, been the very definition of mediocrity.

Epitaphs from the Abyss is the revival we have all been waiting for!!

Not only is the collection topical and very tongue-in-cheek, but it pays the best homage to all the tales that came before. It’s excellent writing and gore-tastic storytelling and I think horror fans are going to jump for joy when this collected volume comes out!

There are some terrifying sequences within these pages. Stories that kept me reading deep into the night and a couple stories that made me laugh out loud. There is a little something for every type of reader and I cannot wait to see how ONI continues with this series!!

PS - this edition comes with some of the most amazing variant covers in the gallery, don’t forget to look at those!