Black & White Horror Comics #1

Black & White Horror Comics #1

Antarctic Press 2021

Written by Marcello Bondi & Andrea Galo Lassere

Illustrated by Daniele Afferni, Stefano Guerrasio, Zulema Lavina

Biagio Leone & Salvatore Coppola

Lettered by Lorenzo Zazzeri, Antonio Russo Tantaro, Biagio Leone

Salvatore Coppola

Translated by Elisa Ceccon, David Blake Lucarelli, Agostino Colletti

Chiara Bellante & Martina Lorenzo

What's black and white and dread all over? A 3-issue miniseries presenting horror art in its rawest form, stark black and white. As if 2020 weren't frightful enough, we've got 32 pages full of terror for you every month this Spring!

I’m a sucker for horror stories and I love finding new books that take on the subject matter. Anthology series are both amazing at introducing us to new creators but on the flip side they end much too soon. It’s just a snippet of what we could hope for in a full story and yet at the same time it showcases extraordinary talent to actually tell a full story in such a short amount of space. Short stories aren’t something that I usually get into but there are a few here that really struck my fancy and make me want to see what they can do when they really cut loose.

The following holds true for all these vignettes. The story & plot development that we see through how the sequence of events unfold and how the reader learns information is presented extremely well. Each one has its own concept and yet the execution remains the same for each one. Also I greatly appreciate that each story is different from all the rest as it gives us different looks at what is or can be that thing which frightens you or just creeps you out as well as proving that not everything is what you think it is. The character development is interesting and with each one it’s interesting to see that the monster isn’t always whom you believe it to be. The pacing is amazing and as it takes us through the pages revealing the characters, the stories and the world’s they live in it really takes us on a journey.

Here’s where things get tricky for me. The interiors here are so vastly different and while yes I have my preferences as to which I prefer I have to say that the linework we see with the varying weights and techniques being utilised to create the detail work that we see is damn near flawless all around. Black and white is an unforgiving medium so it has better be flawless or we’ll see the mistakes but here I can’t find any and that’s no mean feat. That demoness makes me want to see more of her hunter as the creativity and imagination is off the charts. The way that we see backgrounds and how they are incorporated into the composition within the panels to bring us depth perception, a sense of scale and the overall sense of size and scope to the story are extremely nice to see. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels show some truly talented sets of eyes for storytelling.

This is why I love Antarctic Press, they do things that are different and daring and it always pays off. Not being an Anthology Series kind of guy this made me love what I am seeing here. Yes I want the demon hunter to have his own three issue run as that was my favourite story in this book in terms of writing and artwork. The first story though comes in a close second as the idea alone and how we see the events unfold really engage the readers’ mind in some deep ways.

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I love the fact that this is horror that doesn’t rely upon the slasher tropes and instead takes a more cerebral track instead. It is always scarier to think that some things are capable of happening because of situations and circumstances beyond our control.