Writer: Steve Niles
Artist: Ben Templesmith
Letterer: Pat Brosseau
Collecting CRIMINAL MACABRE #1-5
Price: $14.95
Publisher: Dark Horse
ISBN: 1-56971-935-7

Cal McDonald seems like your average neighbourhood pill popping, alcoholic ex-cop private eye. When CRIMINAL MACABRE opens, he's been hauled into a police station to answers some questions about what really happened with a simple case that very quickly becomes something bigger and scarier.

It sounds like Cal is just another haunted-but-determined-to-do-the-right-thing kinda detective... except that his best friend is a ghoul, and the simple case is "tracking a bloodsucker punkass who was doing a little after hours work on some UCLA co-eds".

In the first few pages you'll know whether you want to read more because you'll see the kind of artist Templesmith is and what Niles' dialogue is like. The vicious running commentary from Cal is pitch perfect, but what really made me stop and sit up straight was this line from the fifth page: "Fact is there ain't nothing that walks the Earth that can't be taken down with a slug or a solid blow to the head." Cal is the kind of wise ass you know you'd want to punch in real life, even while he's cracking you up on the page, and CRIMINAL MACABRE knocks horror's beloved monsters off their supernatural perch.

For some writers that would mean the monsters are just the punchline of a joke that forces them to throw hundreds if not thousands of them into the mix because that's only way these hack writers can think to make them scary. Niles is smarter than that, though.

A stronger, faster animal that wants to kill you is scary, and Niles manages to write the most un-mystical monster story I've read in a long time. It's also one of the nastiest and most imaginative. Pulling back from the supernatural aspects doesn't make them less scary because even a wise ass can run out of bullets and has to find a way to kill a vamp nipping at his heels.

It helps that Niles is a horror writer. Not a writer who loved monster movies as a kid and wants to write a story with them (see THE MUMMY, DRACULA 2000, VAN HELSING, et al), but an honest to goodness horror writer. He knows that the scariest movie villain in decades is Anthony Hopkins, a balding overweight sexagenarian, and monsters have been made irrelevant by bad writers, but not because they're no longer scary. A monster lurking in an alleyway to kill you is still scary if you do it right.

In 30 DAYS OF NIGHT, Niles and Templesmith teamed up to create one of the best vampire stories since SALEM'S LOT. In this book, they've set out to tell a different kind of story, and have created a larger tapestry to draw on. The monsters of the book are the typical supernatural beasts, vampires and werewolves, but there are also demons and ghouls. The ghouls are dead - not in a brain eating zombie dead kind of way, just dead and living in the sewers. Nobody seems quite sure why.

One of the ghouls, Mo'lock, is what passes for Cal's best friend and right hand man. Well, right hand 'thing'. There's also the unbelieving Detective Brueger, who brings Cal in for advice and quickly finds herself dragged into this mess. But what makes the book really special is Cal. Niles has managed to create a brilliant character, one of the best horror characters to emerge in years. It would be easy to knock the accomplishment by pointing out that Cal is just a screwed up self-destructive private eye stereotype tossed into a horror book, but that criticism misses the point.

Cal doesn't use the case to find a way to become a better man, or aspire to something greater. He's stuck doing what he does because he attracts the supernatural and is just a naturally curious person, so he ends up taking a lot of drugs and killing the monsters causing him trouble. He's very similar to Abraham Van Helsing as Bram Stoker wrote him, a man who people think is crazy, but who possesses an intimate knowledge of the supernatural. In the 1890s he was an eccentric doctor; today he's a sarcastic investigator; but both were drawn to the field, unable to escape the pull it has over them while almost everyone treats them as insane pariahs.

The book is a perfect example of the use of tone in comics storytelling. Niles has a story that he and Templesmith could have used to tell an epic apocalyptic tale, but instead they've crafted a funny horror story, a horrific comedy, and it's that tension that makes the book unique. While the case may really freak Cal out, he's not above using a model whale to kill a vampire.

Ben Templesmith became big last year with artwork that drew heavily on the influences of Ashley Wood and Bill Sienkiewicz. He's young, but he's already developing his own style, and this book sees him fulfilling his earlier promise.

The page layouts are make the book really stand out. Each page is like a snowflake - or a flesh wound - in that no two look alike. Every single page may seem sketch at first glance, but on closer examination every panel is beautifully horrific, each line and drop of colour deliberate. There are individual panels that could be hung on a wall as works of art, and the pages are almost too busy to be drunk in a single glance.

Rob Zombie wrote in his introduction that all fanboys should get down on their knees and kiss Niles for making comics cool, and who am I to argue with the man? This is a great comic, and I look forward to the sequel.

Alex Dueben is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.

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