Werewolves. Not really touched much by comics. The comic’s messy and watercolor-stained art attracted me, and to hear this was a murder mystery was a nice touch. The cover even looks like something from Ben Templesmith, but you will see in the pages it isn’t quite so. The story starts off with about 5 pages of onomatopoeias of a group of men killing a family. Later you are shown a man who is visiting Harbor Moon to find out why his father requested him to go there. He is soon met with resistance and cold shoulders, this town doesn’t like strangers. That really got me hooked because it kind of felt like Silent Hill. It was a quiet country town that no one goes to, and usually, you never come out of those. As I read, further along, there would be 2-3 pages of dialog but you never knew half their names until later in the story, it was pretty odd. I was confused as to who was saying what and what time frame this was all in. It all comes together in the end, but I hate being left 100% clueless like that so early on, it frustrated me and almost made me put the book down.
Flipping back and forth a few pages to find out who’s talking about it is bad writing. The action scenes were also confusing and disorienting either because of the art style or poor storyboarding. The action picks up later on, but the plot starts to become predictable towards the end instead of leaving you clueless. I eventually realized who was what and why before the story told me, and that’s not good. It doesn’t mean that’s completely bad, it just won’t leave you hanging like most comics will. I also couldn’t become attached to any of the characters because they felt generic and there weren’t any special traits about them. The Sheriff is your typical man in charge of hiding the town secretly, there’s a girl who falls for the stranger, and then there’s the band of secret cult society who are out to kill the townspeople (I won’t say why). We’ve seen this set up in horror movies before so it’s nothing new at all.
It doesn’t mean this is a bad comic, just average. While the art is very stylized the characters look deformed and everyone has nearly perfectly square heads…very strange. I also found that all the men looked the same so I didn’t know who was talking. This comic has a lot of potential and is entertaining while it lasts, just nothing memorable like 30 Days of Night, Cancertown, or The Walking Dead. This is an average horror comic, but still worth a read.
