Matthew Sturges, Luca Rosi, et al, House of Mystery (Vertigo, 2008- ), $2.99, monthly.
Don’t believe the hype, I always say.
Except when the hype is worth believing. And this is
showing to be one of those times when credulity is indeed
in order. I have successfully resisted the lure of
Sturges’s Jack of
Fables, an easy
task since it is a fairly sorry spinoff of
Fables, in this case spinning of a character no
true-blue Fables fan ever liked anyway. But the
original House of
Mystery was a
youthful pleasure of mine back when it was an anthology
book, a vain attempt to resurrect the horror comic martyred
by the Comics Code (a Code that D.C. had themselves worked
to institutionalize in order to drive E.C., the true
pioneer of the genre, out of the business). As a kid I had
heard of E.C.’s famous series from the previous
generation—Tales
from the Crypt, The Haunt of
Fear—but that was
an age before reprints or the internet. So I settled
for House of
Mystery, which
seemed to every now and then give up the horror genre for
Martian Manhunter or sci fi. They were dark days. It was
for me Gaiman’s Sandman that gave the House itself a new life,
the home of Cain, the serial murderer of his brother Abel,
denizen of the House of Secrets.
It is only now with the new House of
Mystery, however,
that the house has been allowed to emerge as a character in
its own right—a tormented and powerful spirit who is now
embarking on an adventure of its own. Or, so it appears.
Actually, nine issues in, there are a lot more appearances
than hard facts to go on, and it could well be argued that
the fairly mystifying pace of the story (as compared, for
instance, to its close cousin Fables) is not working in its favor. The first
story arc introduced us to Fig, a young woman who has spent
her lifetime spinning stories for her father and drawing
pictures of a mysterious house only to find herself one
night chased by a spectral couple into the very house she
had been dreaming of her whole life. Here she encounters a
lively Victorian saloon with customers from every walk of
life and every corner of the known and unknown universe.
But when she sets out to leave, she finds that she cannot
return to the world from which she came. This puts her in
the elect company of a small group of “regulars,” visitors
who, like Fig, have remained trapped in the House, waiting
for an invitation to leave with a dashing (if taciturn)
stranger.
Nine issues in, and this is about all I have to share with
you. There is more of course: the landscape outside of the
garden walls has mysteries of its own, as do the
(literally) twisting and turning corridors of the house
itself. And there is a basement which I for one would not
have set out to explore. But there is none of the tidy
book-length happy-endings that Willingham so wonderfully
manages in his ongoing epic. It will be many, many issues
before we have a coherent plot summary to offer.
Fortunately, the book retains its inheritance from the old
anthology horror comic days sufficient to offer us a
regular self-contained story in each issue, usually told by
one of the regulars of the bar as partial payment on their
tab. These stories bring in guest artists and occasionally
guest writers, especially Willingham himself, and serve as
much as a down payment on our readerly attention credit as
they do to the barkeep’s ledgers. They keep us coming back
for more, much as the flashbacks (and now flashforwards)
in Lost beg our patience through the endless
deferrals of revelation. And it works, at least for this
reader, at least so far. Luca Rossi’s art combines some of
the elements of 100 Bullets and Fables somehow into one mise-en-page, a perfect
tone for this book, and Sturges, while no Willingham by any
stretch, seems to be growing more confident with every
issue of this series. I still have some reservations, I
will confess, and unlike our poor protagonists of
House of
Mystery, I can
and will leave at any time the whole thing ceases to
provide me both short- and long-term reasons to stay. But I
have a feeling I will still be reading this one at issue
#50, even as I am equally sure I will not know a whole lot
more at that point than I do now about the house or its
mysteries.
