Blackwood by Evan Dorkin, Veronica Fish, and Andy Fish

All the most interesting people have the least-likely careers. (Says the man who started out as a SF editor and somehow ended up doing content marketing for corporate lawyers.) Evan Dorkin was a fiery young cartoonist in the '80s and 90s when I discovered his work, writing and drawing id-fueled scrawls like Milk & Cheese and The Eltingville Club. But somehow, along the way, his modern comics career is mostly about writing vaguely Lovecraftian-flavored fantasy/horror adventure stories for other artists to draw.

Like Beasts of Burden or Calla Cthulhu - or like this book: Blackwood, written by Dorkin with art by wife-and-husband team Veronica and Andy Fish.

Blackwood College seems to be just another mid-rank private learning institution, though it seems like all of their fields of study are specialized cases of anthropology with various cultural, occult, or religious bends. It's not that simple, of course: Blackwood has Deep Secrets.

And four brand-new first year students, who have all been recruited to the secret college-within-a-college at Blackwood, are going to find out about those secrets the hard way.

Blackwood collects a four-issue series, so it gets going quickly - with some old guy who just did something magically dangerous and is now dictating his last words while Something happens to him - and keeps at a blistering pace throughout. There's not a lot of room for the lore of this place to be explained, so the reader (and those four main characters) pick it up in bits and pieces as Dorkin tosses it out.

The last issue hits all of those Deep Secrets, some of which the reader will have guessed and some of which seem to come out of left field. (I wonder if this was originally planned to be longer - maybe six issues? and it got shortened somewhere in the process.) It all runs just a hair too fast and is a hair too generically Creeping Horrors for me, but it is fun and zippy throughout, and the Fishes make good artistic choices: they do grotesquerie well and Veronica's chapter-break art is particularly atmospheric and spooky.

All in all, I wanted a little more How This World Works and a little less "ahh! the bugs are going to kill us!" but this is largely a Teenagers in Danger movie done as a comic, so what I wanted is somewhat outside the bounds of the genre. This is just fine for what it is, and sets up a world where there could be plenty of other stories - I know there's at least one more already.