Sometimes I'll grab a last issue when I find it; and sometimes I'll randomly find one already in my collection, like today's book: From 2001,
Flinch #16, with "The Wedding Breakfast" Written by Mike Carey, art by Craig Hamilton; "a temporary life." Written by Charlie Boatner, art by Philip Bond; and "Descent" Written by Guy Gonzalez, art by Danijel Zezelj. Cover by Richard Corben.
This was Vertigo's short-lived horror anthology: they had done more themed mini-series like
Weird War Tales,
Weird Western Tales, and
Strange Adventures; but
Flinch was a little more free-form. Vertigo was pretty good about getting names for those; but I don't know if 8-page stories were big enough draws.
In "The Wedding Breakfast," a shifty Victorian plots to use the poorhouse his father sponsored, to get a new downstairs maid. That's his cover story anyway, he's just looking for a suitable human sacrifice to the lords of hell; and young, naive Mala seems tailor-made for it: no close friends, prone to fantastic stories, and seemingly convinced her lost father would find her. The lamb is led to the slaughter sure enough, but of course there's a twist. "a temporary life." finds a young temp worker, smitten and grateful to his lovely supervisor Tina for the job, who volunteers for a metabolic study that gives him super-speed. Less like the Flash, more like "
Wink of an Eye." He would do anything for her, but what can he do at invisible speed and aging rapidly? Lastly, in "Descent" a young man checking out a sleazy live sex show gets more than he bargained for...and then more still.
Zezelj's art makes it creepy as hell; I'd seen his work in
Captain America: Dead Man Running.
So I just read it. Wow. Nice twists, although the 2nd one really isn't so much a twist as just pretty fucking cruel, and the 3rd one just seems like a PSA against going to strip clubs & possibly an indictment on the porn industry, idk.
ReplyDeleteI definitely remember the cover to this first issue due to how freaky it looked when I saw an ad for it in an issue of Wizard at the time. I'm not sure why I didn't get into it or the other anthology ones other than I was young, dumb and mostly stuck to mainstream titles, very rarely venturing outside of them other than occasionally buying indy stuff from Image.
I did buy the 1st issue of Weird War Tales though and definitely found myself tearing up reading one of the stories.
Looks I'm going to have to go back and read ALL of these now.