By Sam Christopher
Moonstone publishes some really excellent stuff. They do Domino Lady and Airboy and The Spider. But my favorite thing they do is Kolchak: The Night Stalker, whose running series was cool but now they do specials and minis with the character. S’okay, I’ll take all the Carl Kolchak I can get. Here we have Kolchak: The Night Stalker: The Lovecraftian Damnation. Told in “widevision”—as with The Spider, this story is told in prose bordering around drawings—this is a story of Carl Kolchak’s past catching up with him a little. He’s called to the set of “Challenge of the Unknown” by the show’s host Marvin Richards (yes, yes, we all know that would make Richards one of the “Challengers of the Unknown”) and told to start drinking. In another time, Carl had been there when a Dr. Randel Penes had gulled the show’s producers into finding the Necronomicon for him—the original, true, “written in human blood, bound in human flesh” Necronomicon. The good doctor had then used the book of dark magic to call forth what amounts to one of the Old Ones from Lovecraft stories and Carl was evidently in the wrong place at the wrong time—as usual—and destroyed the book and forced the doc into the other dimension with the Nyogtha, the Old One. But now, it seems, the Nyogtha is forcing its way back to our world, with Penes at the forefront. And all that’s before Carl finds out his old friend Dr. Kirsten Helms has also been called in, along with another necromancer. Writer C. J. Henderson here does an excellent job of rendering Moonstone’s Kolchak, who has been a little updated while also been dragged back a little more in line with Jeff Rice’s original vision for the character, while at the same time giving us an interesting story that is a little too short in some ways. It’s very good in concept but it seems like there is much more buildup than warranted by the climax. I think this tale would have benefited from being a four-ish mini rather than a one-shot. Also, Robert Hack’s artwork shows him to be anything but. His gruff style and asymmetric character sketches are an excellent choice for Kolchak in general and this story in particular. Especially good for old-time fans is the pages 10-11 splash with Carl looking genuinely haunted by the memories of past supernatural baddies playing about his head. Thank you, Moonstone, may we have another?
And then I read Fringe: Tales from the Fringe #1. Um… well… the, uh, cover was kinda neat looking. Sorry, there just wasn’t that much to recommend the book, other than a cameo by Lex Luthor, who apparently creates Elektra in the Fringe Universe. The first story, with Peter, just wasn’t that great. The second was the one with Elektra trying to kill Lex. None of this was very compelling, sorry. Maybe if I had watched the show this past season it would have been better.
