The Four Color Media Monitor

Forbes reports the artist Mike Mignola is launching yet another horror thriller, Bowling With Corpses:

After three decades of captivating comic book customers with the exploits of Anung Un Rama — otherwise known as Hellboy – Mike Mignola is trying something new.

That something new is Bowling with Corpses and Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown (now on sale from Dark Horse Comics), a collection of deliciously macabre stories loosely inspired by folklore found ‘round the world. It’s a place where Mignola can “do a story based on a Japanese story” and “have it feel Japanese without taking place in a real Japan,” the celebrated author-illustrator tells me over email.

The only yarn not subject to Mignola’s re-interpretation is the one that gives the book its name. “Some years ago, I stumbled across this Italian folktale about a kid who went bowling with corpses and fell in love with it,” he recalls. “So I finally sat down to create this whole world — the idea being that I’d create something like our real world where I could set all my stories. I fell in love with the world-building, ending up with maps of the world, a mythology, and creation myth for the place. And rather than adapt stories (other than the story Bowling with Corpses), the other stories in the collection just grew out of the world I’d created.”

He continues: “It’s hard to pick [a favorite] story, as I view the whole book as one big teaser for this new world. If I had to pick, it would probably have to be the title story, as it’s what started the whole ball rolling — and I do love the kid with the magic mummified hand. I want to tell more stories about him.”

In a way, the entirety of the Hellboy mythos — which steadily draws from mythology, folklore, and classic horror fiction — has been a proof of concept for Corpses, which features colors by Dave Stewart and letters by Clem Robins. But while Big Red occupies what is “still meant to be more or less the our real world,” Mignola explains, this anthology inhabits a completely fantastical reality, one full of “sea dragons” and “giant public temples built in the name of and giant public temples to a hundred different gods. This new world is a fun one to build and play around in.”

Gee, if this builds as much on horror components as Hellboy did, what's so new? All Mignola's doing is sticking with the darkness, failing to prove he can take a change of pace for the brighter and more optimistic. And if he must keep telling dark tales, it's hypocritical how artists and writers like him won't take on serious real life issues like Islamic terrorism. It's been clear for a long time that when it comes to real life issues like those, the advocates of darkness grind to a screeching halt.

If Mignola really wants to prove he's creative, he'll take the challenge of developing a story that's in brighter territory, and even comedic without being gross. For now, he isn't turning out anything new. Just more of the same horror-themed mishmash.

Labels: Europe and Asia, indie publishers, msm propaganda, violence