CREDIT: Liquid Comics
Rating: 2.5/5 – Wes Craven Story With Concept Stronger Than Execution.
By ComicSpectrum senior reviewer Shawn Hoklas.
It was a sad day when Wes Craven passed away earlier this year. There’s so many of his creations that I’m fond of and it’s sad to think that we won’t be seeing anymore movies from this wonderful creator. Before Wes Craven passed away, in 2012, he had announced that he and ’30 Days of Night’ writer Steve Niles would be releasing an original graphic novel called Coming of Rage. Flash forward a couple years and it never quite made it to print. Last year though, Coming of Rage was digitally released and now, in 2015 the comic has finally been released in print comic book form by Liquid Comics.
To be honest, I completely forgot about this book and after waiting for three years, my enjoyment did not live up to the anticipation. Coming of Rage’s title is a play on words as a young man named Ritchie heads home in order to hear out his dying father’s wishes for him to take over the family business. For two extremely talented writers, the dialogue is over the top and never sounds real. As Ritchie’s father lays in bed, he’s yelling at his son phrases like, “Do it or be doomed!” and “You’ll be damned to hell!”. The art by Francesco Biagini is the high point of this issue. He’s got a heavy and inky like line to his art. He uses a wide variety of panel layouts throughout the issue and although his art isn’t ultra detailed, it’s clear enough to always know the locales, settings and backgrounds.
When the protagonist heads to a local bar, we see more of the horror themes that Craven promised when he came up with the concept of “A Vampire, a Werewolf and a Zombie walk into a bar…” as we meet all three by the end of this issue. That’s the concept for this series, but it’s a better as a concept than is realized in the actual story. Coming of Rage is planned for a five issue series, but I’m afraid that I won’t be back for the remainder. If the idea of this series is to see what happens when a vampire, a werewolf and a zombie walk into a bar, I’m no longer interested in finding out.
Reviewed by: Shawn Hoklas
(shawn@comicspectrum.com)
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