[One would wonder, if I didn’t like the first issue, why
would I continue reading to issue eleven? I love horror comics anthologies, and
this was the only one back then. They got much better over the course of their
run to the point that I was sad when it got canceled. Anyway, I got to curse in
this one, proving that no one was reading my reviews. Later, one of my
Primitive Underbelly columns (with Jesse Russell, the GonZo to my STRAIGHT)
cursed, and it brought management down on us. Those were the days! From the
Elmhurst College Leader March 13, 2000.]
It’s finally happened—with the eleventh issue, Flinch has
finally found its stride. The first issue had been terrible, and as the months
passed by, an occasional good story would pop up, like Garth Ennis’s (Preacher,
Hitman, Punisher) version of Titanic called “Satanic” (issue 3) which put forth
the idea that everyone on board the Titanic deserved to die because they were
all hedonistic Satan worshippers who sacrificed the third-class passengers.
There was Joe R. Lansdale’s (Jonah Hex, Dead in the West, Blood and Shadows)
“Betrothed” (issue 5), in which a man digs up the fresh corpse of a woman so he
can marry her (the guy ended up getting hit by a car driven by the man who
killed the woman, at which point the killer said, “Torture and murder is one
thing. But messing with a corpse . . . you got to be sick for that kind of
thing”).
This time, all three stories are great. Lansdale
kicks off the issue with his story, “Red Romance.” Like his last Flinch story,
it’s a love story. While Billy’s clubbing some old lady dead for her money, he
watches a beautiful woman slitting some guy’s throat, also for his money. It
was love at first sight. In typical Lansdale
fashion, they fall in with each other after Billy shows his love to her by
slaughtering a couple of kids for a quarter (yes, they fuck in the blood of the
corpses). They have a fun time killing people, but after a while they start
cutting each other while in the throes of passion. They got bored with that
after a while, and, well . . . anyone who has read Lansdale’s
work can tell where this is going. This is dark comedy pulled right to its
splatterpunk limit, and then some. Even Bruce Timm’s artwork is askewed.
Sometimes it looks like art for comics directed at children, but there’s other
times, like when Billy’s getting his teeth pulled out and his girlfriend is
grinning with a mad gleam in her eyes, screaming, “HURT HIM! HURT HIM!”
The punchline? When Billy’s watching the hit man he hired
rape his girlfriend, the hitman turns and knocks Billy unconscious. When he
wakes up, he says, “We hired the same man!”
John Rozum’s story, “Travellers Lodge Emergent,” is weaker
than “Betrothed,” but it emphasizes the horror. Working from a plot similar to
Stephen King’s “The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands,” a convict volunteers for experiments
to get his sentence cut. He gets out of prison, finds a wife, finds a happier
life than he’s ever had only to find that the experiments had messed up his
internal organs. He started growing new ones, in addition to having toxins
filtered out of his system like sweat. This results in what he calls the
Anti-Midas touch: everything he touches dies. Needless to say, that screws up
his life, and he naturally loses the good life that he had built, including his
wife. In the end, he finds himself pumping his body with drugs and alcohol in
hopes that he’ll manage to kill himself. The story, like bare bones artwork of
Cliff Wu Chiang, is nothing earth-shattering, but it’s nice to see Flinch is
actually trying to get the horror element into their monthly horror anthology.
The third story is simply insane. Dave Taylor’s artwork is,
like Darick Robertson’s work on Transmetropolitan, brain candy. Every time you
look at it, you notice something new, especially in the beginning. More often
than not, the plethora of images are disturbing, particularly when depicting
pivotal moments in the plot. Not only that, but he doesn’t stop at using speech
bubbles—he mixes the lettering into the artwork.
It’s perfect for Ian Carney’s Woody Allen-esque story.
Lawrence Keyhoe is love’s bitch—always forlorn and desperate for a woman. His
pinched face and balding head reflect how pathetic he feels. What is the
natural thing to do? Buy a Boil in the Bag Girlfriend, of course! He puts the
sack in a tub filled with boiling water and soon, he has a girlfriend just like
instant rice. She doesn’t have hair or features that identify her as a woman
yet, but she develops pretty fast (except for her speech—at one point, she
says, “you work. i sleep. develop. Tonight fuck fuck.”).
Naturally he comes home from work to find that she ran off
with a Boil in the Bag Boyfriend. At least it’s not a whole loss; as Keyhoe
says in the last panel, “Hey! I’ve got an ex!”
To cap it off, the cover by Phil Hale is disturbing as
usual, showing off a man holding a dog with a woman’s face, which looks
suspiciously like a blow up doll’s face.
Comic book horror anthologies are great ideas, and they have
been great ideas since the Crypt-Keeper, Vault-Keeper, and Old Witch
entertained readers of the ‘Fifties. It’s good to see Flinch finally give
itself a facelift and start telling good stories.
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