WORDS, PICTURES AND BLOOD By L. L. Soares Hey there, groovy ghoulies! We're going to take a look at some of the latest illustrated fiction out there today. Two titles that are being put out by Pitt Bros. Productions and one put out by IDW.

The first Pitt Bros. comic is called HENRY & BUTCHER # 1. It's a "mature readers" comic and begins a storyline called "I Don't Belong Here," written by Gonzalo Ventura and illustrated by Martin Blanco, who does the art and lettering here. It's the story of Henry, a retired boxer who owns his own boxing club, and the fateful day when his life changes completely. He had a family, friends and his own gym, but now he's an inmate at an insane asylum. How did he get there?

He also has a past he'd rather forget, as an enforcer for the mob. You see, ol' Henry was once a boxer with a lot of promise, but after getting beaten pretty badly by Crusher James, the last in a series of injuries that forced him to retire from the sport, he took a job offer from mob boss Vitorio Baroni to become a hired thug. Henry found he was pretty good at "reduce(ing) people into red pulps." But after a few years of this, he started to get a conscience and decided to turn his life around.

Somehow, Henry succeeds at getting out of the mob and getting a second chance at life. In fact, everything looks up for him until the fateful night when he goes driving after some drinks with friends and crashes his car. Bloody and confused, he walks to his house to find his wife and kids gone, replaced by another family. Henry is sure this is his house and threatens the family who lives there, even beating up the father. The cops are called, and Henry runs away. But this isn't the only weird change in his life. His old gym is gone now too, replaced by a candy factory. But he does find his dog, a pit bull named Butcher, who now talks to him. In fact, Butcher's pretty eloquent and it looks like he knows a lot about what's going on.

When the police catch up with Henry, Butcher is telling him some very important stuff, but all we (and the cops) hear are barks. Henry refuses to go peacefully, and things get ugly.

The story is actually pretty interesting in this first issue, and you find yourself wanting to know more. What exactly IS going on? Is this all part of Henry's dementia, or is something much more sinister happening? The writing keeps the story going smoothly, and the black and white art is moody, giving the comic a noir atmosphere that works well with Henry's strange tale.

The second Pitts Bros. comic is called THE LEGEND OF JOE MOON # 0 and features writing, once again, by Gonzalo Ventura, with art by Manuel and Leonardo Silva (Martin Blanco does just the lettering this time). This one's a Western about a bounty hunter named Joe Moon. He has a kind of "Man With No Name" feel and even dresses like Clint Eastwood's character in those spaghetti westerns.

The bad guys are the Harrison Brothers, two psychos who kill a sheriff during a robbery and take his wife (daughter? Or is she just an innocent bystander?) along with them to their hideout.

Joe Moon finds them pretty easily, and uses a clever trick involving a coffin to get the drop on the bigger of the two brothers. Oh, and there's another thing about Joe Moon. He's a werewolf. Which means he finishes off both brothers without too much problem and even accidentally bites off one of the pretty captive's hands in the process of rescuing her.

THE LEGEND OF JOE MOON is the more mainstream of the two comics, and its story isn't quite as compelling as HENRY & BUTCHER's, because it sometimes lapses into Western clich?s. We know what to expect from the cover, and there isn't a compelling mystery this time around. But Ventura tells a good story, and I thought the artwork for JOE MOON was pretty good. The use of thick lines even reminded me a bit of one of my favorite comics artists, Mark Texeira.

In both comics the artwork accentuates the mood of the piece. While both seem a little stiff at certain points, since they don't have the overall slickness of mainstream comics, overall they both succeed nicely in creating an appropriate tone. If these titles are examples of what they have in store for us, then we can expect good things from the Pitt Bros.

The third title I want to talk about here is called 30 DAYS OF NIGHT: BEYOND BARROW, and it's put out by IDW, which has put out all of the various 30 DAYS OF NIGHT miniseries. For those who don't know, Steve Niles is the talented writer behind this series, about an Alaskan town called Barrow, a place where the sun "doesn't rise between November 18th and December 17th" every year, and where, in the first series, some vampires discovered this and decided it was the perfect location for a feast. Against almost impossible odds, the townspeople struggled to survive against these seemingly indestructible predators. That first series was so popular that they've made a movie out of it, coming out next month, and it's also spawned a bunch of comic book sequels, all written by Niles.

The original series was drawn by the talented Ben Templesmith who brought a kind of abstract style to the whole thing which reminded me a bit of Bill Sienkiewicz. I thought that was an interesting decision for a horror comic. This time around, the legend himself, Bill Sienkiewicz, is doing the artwork - after many years of being absent (well, restricting his rare work to covers) from the comics medium. The return of Sienkiewicz is a reason to celebrate. This is the same guy who drew ELEKTRA: ASSASIN back in the 1980's after all., and he might just be my favorite comics artist ever.

BEYOND BARROW shows us a Barrow which has survived past massacres and is armed to the teeth. This place isn't an easy target anymore. In the first issue of this miniseries, we witness two things: 1) a group of vampires who decide to make a pit stop in Barrow (even though it is now "forbidden" to their kind) and who meet a mysterious, untimely end before they can get there, and 2) the arrival by plane of billionaire Richard Denning and his entourage of family and friends. Mr. Denning is a self-proclaimed adventurer and wants to see a vampire up close. His companions seem more like tourists who want to see the sights where the past violence took place, including the grave of Eben Olemaun, the sheriff who saved the town the first time around.

My only complaint is that the lettering for this series is small and dark, and hard to read at times. But that's a minor quibble. Otherwise, things seem set up for another rousing tale from Niles. And Sienkiewicz's art is as beautiful as ever.

That's all for this time, cats. I'm starting to feel a bit parched. Maybe a flight to Alaska would be in order.

Ordering info:

The ordering info is: Henry & Butcher The Legend of Joe Moon