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What's Halloween Man? As I wrote before:
Drew Edwards' Halloween Man is an independent comic that is as pure of heart as it is clever. Here is a story that unabashedly calls on the spirit of horror-- classic horror, modern horror, B-movie and forgotten horror, all of it-- to endow a hero to fight the powers of darkness in much the way that horror empowers its own enthusiasts to face the darkness in our own lives. I've been reading the comic for years, on and off, and I can't think of another story that comes closer to the feeling Ray Bradbury summoned in The Halloween Tree: a joyous celebration of Halloween.
...Halloween Man himself is a flesh-lusting zombie, the revived writer Solomon Hitch, killed by a vampire and brought back to life by a John Constantine-like necromancer called Morlack.
In the past, Halloween Man stories have tended to be very compressed, like old-school Avengers stories or the one-shot Tales of the Unexpected comics of my youth. But No Safe Word is a quantum leap forward for Drew Edwards-- it's the first part of a two-parter in which Solomon is investigating a killer who stalks the leather bars of Solar City. While that makes this story the first slightly not-safe-for-work Halloween Man story (only barely-- there's subject matter but no nudity here), it allows Edwards to draw parallels between Solomon, the outcast zombie feared by both mortals and monsters, and the citizens of the BDSM world who feel ostracized and ignored. It makes the heart swell to see Solomon decide to investigate the killings there when no one else will.
I love the fully-realized gonzo world of Halloween Man. I can't wait to go back!
And it's a two-parter, so go check it out, and then come around next month!
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