Joshua Malbin

I can’t say right now whether the movie based on Morning Glories will be any good. But I can say, just based on the first issue (which sold out on its first day) that there will definitely be a movie. For all I know there may already be a deal in place; the new trend seems to be to make deals for movies and comics simultaneously.

Morning Glory Academy is basically the Bizarro version of Hogwarts or Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. It’s not clear from the pre-credit sequence—erm, opening pages—whether the children there are extraordinarily gifted in paranormal or merely normal ways. What we see is extreme facility with chemistry, gymnastics, and martial arts. But it is clear that the school is eeeeeeeeeviiiillll. A student tries to escape and the teachers let this ghost thing eat his brain. Or maybe his mind, since it just seems to be sticking a hand through his head.

Then the story steps back to focus on a new set of kids as they say goodbye to their families, some more dysfunctionally than others, and prepare to leave for Morning Glory for the first time. The rest of issue #1 deals with them settling in and making certain initial discoveries about the place, one of which is that it’s eeeeeeevil.

It’s totally entertaining and about an inch and a half deep. I’m fine with that.

One preview here. Another below the fold.

(continue reading…)

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I didn’t review Nick Spencer’s Shuddertown #1 right away because…well, partly because I forgot, and partly because whenever I did remember it I wasn’t sure what to say about it.  The writing is self-consciously “writerly,”a lot of internal monologue about lying and truth that seems in the end only to be intended to serve to signal to the reader that the narrator might be lying, without having any specific meaning to the narrator himself. Perhaps it will later, but it’s not picked up in #2, so who knows.

On the other hand, the plot itself was built around a strong central horror mystery: a homicide detective gets four cases in a row with tons of forensic evidence leading in each case to a different, easily identified culprit. Unfortunately, each of these suspects is a man who died years ago, and whom the hero busted for one thing or another years before that.

Granted, that’s the kind of mystery that’s exceedingly difficult to pay off without a letdown, but it’s still a decent hook.

Adam Geen’s art is also nice, a lot of big color washes for background behind some kind of rotoscope process for the buildings and people. The combination is used to strong effect when the hero experiences sensory overload or dislocation, in a strip club, for example, or under the influence of pills or cocaine.

So I guess I could say I was waiting for the second issue to do a review, looking for a tiebreaker between the elements I liked and the ones I didn’t. Yet issue #2 has entirely different weaknesses, notably misjudgments in pacing that have us spending far too much time on events of seemingly little consequence. I am thinking in particular of the seven-page scene that opens the issue, when our hero wakes in the care of a priest who repeatedly offers him flapjacks. As far as we can tell, that priest knows nothing of interest to him or to us, except for the origins of the name “Shuddertown.”

The writerly writing makes  reappearance near the end, but at least this time it’s fit to the story instead of being off on its own. It does slip into past tense for the first time, though, leaving the reader wondering just what the hell the vantage point for the narration is supposed to be.

All in all, I guess I feel like Shuddertown is a promising glimpse of talent from a writer who hasn’t learned to edit himself very well yet, or hasn’t found someone good to do it for him.

Preview here.

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