We all have our favourite comic characters and while I have recently been collecting any Catwoman comics featuring cats on the cover, my habits haven’t changed greatly. I’m interested in anything involving Daredevil, Man-Thing, Howard The Duck and … Werewolf By Night. This all goes back to the Sixties and Seventies, and the attraction remains as strong as ever. I would once have included Moon Knight in what was an unbreakable group of five, but recent series have been so tepid, with overblown storylines, I have found my affection fading there.
Werewolf By Night doesn’t pop up that often, and when it does it’s nothing spectacular, although the recent spurious ‘Blood Hunt’ tie-in issue, featuring a totally different protagonist (Jake Gomez instead of Jack Russell), seemed absolutely ridiculous. No idea what happened there!
Anyway, we have a new series now, with Jack living in a mysterious castle that had appeared in the Rockies, and while the artwork is very modern, chunky and brash, as though designed from a template, there is humour at the start when a podcaster approaches the building, aware that a reasonable werewolf may be in residence. A truculent Jack soon scares him away.
We get to see Jack trying to enjoy a tranquil life, getting on with his neighbours in a small community and even running the local ferry service. Then disaster strikes and we’re back into usual werewolf tropes in that people get slaughtered, including local friends, and he assumes he’s the one that did it. Elsa Bloodstone comes to check up on him, tries to make him question whether someone else could be responsible and even ends up dragging Moon Knight (oho!) along into the action when the subplot of vampire/dark forces from Transylvania (currently using Dracula’s old castle as a base) come a calling.
It’s not rubbish by any means, the story moving along at a decent pace, and the interplay between the main characters is good. I’ll be collecting happily, but … this whole red band nonsense, where the issues come bagged up, to protect the innocent, supposedly heralding super-gory content within … is just another modern pointless gimmick. There’s nothing shocking involved, and it’s a royal pain in the arse trying to get the comic back into the bag afterwards. I hope those die out very quickly.