Friday, March 28, 2014

AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN CHICAGO: A review of MONGREL SON OF A BITCH



Werewolves are bad enough as it is. Now throw an insane werewolf into a revenge plot on the mean streets of Chicago, and what you have is pure lunacy. (Er, no pun intended. Seriously. Puns suck.) Wil Solomon is the unfortunate cop who gets caught in the middle of this mystery, and he’s intent on solving it.


All right, taking a hardboiled story and putting the supernatural into it is nothing new. Cops hunting down werewolves on their beat has been done a few times. Yet this story feels somehow different. Maybe it’s the secret society of werewolves, although that was done in FERALS. Or maybe it’s the psychological mess of what is reality and what is in Wil’s mind? No, that’s been done before, too.


It’s probably the fact that this is more of a noir story than a horror story. From the very moment you meet the hero, you know he’s doomed, and it’s just a matter of watching him march to whatever horrible, gut-wrenching end he has waiting for him at the end of the darkened, stinking alley.


But is the hero Wil? Or is it Eric, the crazy werewolf bent on exacting his great and terrible revenge? Wil sure lacks a lot of heroic qualities, after all. He’s got his own secrets, one of them being the fact that he’s cheating on his wife. Maybe it’s premature to call him a hero. Maybe he’s more of a protagonist. But he does have the single-minded determination that most heroes have.


Yet Eric has that very same single-minded determination, at least when it comes to slaying his enemies. It’s not like he doesn’t have his reasons for doing this, but then again, it is pretty crazy.


It’s safe to say there are no bad guys here, just the savage and the doomed, and sometimes they’re the same people. That’s what sets this book apart from the others. Writer Ed Dunphy knows exactly what he’s doing as he spins this tale of betrayal, blood (not just the fluid in your veins, but also in the family relations sense), fury and destruction, from the very moment we see Eric ripping another werewolf to pieces until the tragic ending of issue three. Artist Andrew M. Kudelka is on the same page. He brings perfect images to the page, and his covers are amazing, especially the one for the first issue as seen above.


This isn’t a perfect book, but it will entertain the fuck out of you. Keep an eye out for a cameo from the son of Mike Royko’s Boss. If you know who that is just from reading this paragraph, then you’re ready for the glories of this book.


MONGREL SON OF A BITCH #1-3
Written by Ed Dunphy
Illustrated by Andrew M. Kudelka
Published by VLP Comics
24-26 pages each

$4.99 each

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