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Review: Die! Boo! Die! – you do wanna hear a scary story!

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Die! Boo! Die!

Edited by Andrew Waugh and Paul Harrison-Davies

Featuring Robert Ball, Becky Barnicoat, Kelly Bastow, Warwick Johnson Cadwell, Jonathan Edwards, Ana Galvan,, Simon Gane & Rob Davis, Paul Harrison-Davies, James Howard, Isaac Lenkiewicz, Jess Smart Smiley, Briony May Smith, Jack Teagle, Donya Todd, Andrew Waugh.

DIE-BOO-DIE-PREVIEW

The first volume of Boo! was a massive critical success, lauded far and wide for damn good reason. The idea of making a good horror comic for children is fraught with problems, most importantly how on Earth to do it properly? Too scary is no good, but nor is too tame. Getting it right is walking a tightrope. Boo! Issue 1 walked the tightrope so well, the seven strips inside managing to be really darkly creepy, the sorts of clever things to send shivers down the spine, no matter how old or young you are.

Now we have the second volume, Die! Boo! Die!, promising more of the same, much more, starting from the format. No longer confined by the A5 format this is a big 24-pages of newspaper sized horror, with 15 different strips from some incredible comic artists. It’s damn good. Just take a look at the collage up there to see what I mean, great diversity of art styles up there.

As before, there’s a mix of styles and moods, some of these are silly, some out and out chillers. It’s a good mix.

boo andrew waugh

(The Stray by Andrew Waugh)

We’ll start right away on the cover with Andrew Waugh’s two-pager ‘The Stray’ where Waugh delivers a quick scary opener. A mystery box of horror, and no, it’s definitely, definitely NOT a dog boys. Slow build up scares on the first pages, drenched in red, red blood on the second page. And then ending with a gag as well. That’s a great opener, but there’s better to come.

boo gane davies 1

(The Granny Annex by Rob Davis and Simon Gane)

Second strip and Rob Davis and Simon Gane basically win the issue with ‘The Granny Annex‘. Frankly it would be high on my best of issue list just for the wonderful, we don’t see enough of it artwork from Gane. But Rob Davis has written something genuinely creepy, with a twist that both grounds it in the everyday and makes it truly horrific.

Little Flora has to get used to having Great-Grandmother come and live with them. Scary, scary, scary old lady that she is.

Or is she a witch?

Or perhaps she’s something much, much worse, perhaps she’s going to tell Flora something so horrible, so nasty, so evil that it will traumatise the little darling for life.

Bloody hell, it’s a nasty, nasty strip. Brilliant though.

boo gane davis2

(The Granny Annex by Rob Davis and Simon Gane)

That’s just genuinely scary, don’t you think? Welcome to those nightmares kids. And grownups. Trust me, what she has to say is a chiller.

Both those openers are two-pagers and overall it’s that extended format that works best here. Several of the single page strips in here don’t necessarily work for me, simply too brief, lacking focus and narrative; Anna Galvan addresses the primal childhood fear of abduction yet doesn’t quite nail it narrative wise, similarly Donya Todd delivers some awesome visuals of sisters overcoming a nightmare, but again it’s a little too dependent on visuals and doesn’t necessarily have the story to make it work. WJC’s ‘The Park‘ looks gorgeous but it’s more a comedy horror than a chiller.

But there are certainly single pagers that work well; Becky Barnicoat’s ‘The Fetch‘ where the childhood nightmare of getting replaced comes true with an underplayed but genuinely bbbrrrrr moment whilst Briony May Smith’s ‘A Visit From Mr Nightmare‘ gets chilling from the get-go with the classic Childcatcher trick of a balletic and wonderfully creepy pantomime-esque villain….

boo a visit from mr nightmare

(A Visit From Mr Nightmare by Briony May Smith)

I enjoyed Jack Teagle’s colourful contribution ‘Tummy Bug‘ where he spins a Kafka-esque moment out of the classic ‘you are what you eat’ phrase whereas Robert Ball’s ‘Welcome To The Family‘ looks gorgeous, the colours, the darkness, the stylings all very much as expected. Very different visual styles and both good, but both perhaps not as scary as they wanted to be, more wacky comedy horror.

Likewise, James Howard goes more for the over-the-top horror gag, the weird found in the ordinary, the return to those childhood fears caused by grown-up advice. The ‘don’t let the bed-bugs bite’ lines, or in this case the advice to ‘don’t pick it’ when a young skateboarder gets a knee scab. ‘Don’t pick it’ is soon turned into the irresistable call of ‘pick me, pick me, pick me’ and a young man finds out just how dangerous succumbing to those urges can be. Howard throws sense out the window and goes mad with the outcome. Silly rather than scary perhaps, but damn good as well.

dont pick it

(Don’t Pick It by James Howard)

The double page centre spread by Paul Harrison-Davies is a gorgeously horrible thing, most of it taken up with the nightmare of ‘Happy World‘, an amusement park full of hideous horses, giant spiders and skeletons forever rotating on the big wheel but even better is the advice to a youngster, a how to guide for a legitimate zombie get-up…

boo phd

If the chill factor had dipped a little by this stage, ‘Together Forever‘ by Jonathan Edwards delivers all the chills you could want in a tale that may get the kids checking their cherished teddies a little more carefully, as Edwards takes the familiar childhood fear of the teddy coming to life and twists it further and further, poor Kyle desperate to rid himself of the nasty little ceramic bear, a thing of pure evil if ever he’s seen one.

boo together forever

It’s all in that smile.

On a similar theme, Kelly Bastow’s tale of Gran’s evil dolly does the same thing, but doesn’t manage the same creeping fear required, opting instead for a final shock panel that just doesn’t really work.

One of the most interesting strips is Jess Smart Smiey’s 2-pager that fills the page with panels, and although not doing anything obviously scary, the tension over time builds up sufficiently to unnerve and panic.

And finally, ending Die! Boo! Die!, there’s the hideously scary final panel of Isaac Lenkiewicz’s strip (you can see an early panel up top), a horrifying moment playing with an old urban legend but done in such a way to send the young and old closing the comic to bed with a shiver and a shake, and an unshakable fear of mirrors. Ending the comic just right.

All in all, Die! Boo! Die! is an excellent new comic, a worthy successor to the success of Boo! Perhaps not quite as great, perhaps lacking enough of the real chills that marked Boo! out as different? perhaps simply diluted with the bigger number of contributors? But regardless, Die! Boo! Die! is a great anthology for kids of all ages.

DIE! BOO! DIE! debuts at The Lakes International Comic Art Festival (this very weekend), and then drags it’s rotting carcass to encore at Thought Bubble (on Saturday 15th November only). It’s limited to just 200 copies though, so I’d get there quickly whilst it’s still available.

The post Review: Die! Boo! Die! – you do wanna hear a scary story! appeared first on Forbidden Planet Blog.


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