Stuff
of Nightmares: The Monster Makers. By
R.L. Stine. Illustrated by A.L. Kaplan. Colored by Roman Titov with Gonçalo
Lopes. BOOM! Studios. $16.99.
Stuff
of Nightmares: No Holiday for Murder.
By R.L. Stine. Illustrated by Adam Gorman and Pius Bak. Colored by Francesco
Segala with assistance by Gloria Martinelli. BOOM! Studios. $16.99.
The thing about tributes is that it really helps to know what they are
tributes to – even if knowing leads to some disappointment in comparing the
tribute to its inspiration. There is no question that R.L. (Robert Lawrence)
Stine (born 1943) greatly admires and has long loved the horror comics of the
old EC Publishing empire under William M. Gaines (1922-1992) – comics that were
destroyed by government attacks and the ensuing censorship during the McCarthy
era, when Stine was still a preteen. Indeed, Stine’s introduction to Stuff of Nightmares: The Monster Makers
makes his love of The Crypt of Terror
and The Vault of Horror explicit, and
Stuff of Nightmares follows the old
comics’ clever framing approach by having the stories introduced by a suitably
weird figure – not the Crypt Keeper or the Old Witch but, here, the Nightmare
Keeper. There is even an attempt, now and again, to duplicate the offhanded
grim humor that was an EC trademark in the framing characters’ introductions
and postmortems (ha!) to the chilling and suitably (often gruesomely)
illustrated stories.
The problem is that Stine, whose career is built on his skill at evoking
chills for young readers, does not have the frightening adeptness of the old EC
writers and artists for producing scary scenarios that appealed to readers
beyond the preteen years. EC Publishing was destroyed in large part because of
the supposed influence of its horror comics on adults, with the charge led by Fredric Wertham through his book Seduction of the Innocent – in which
(and in other venues) Wertham argued that all sorts of criminals, juvenile
delinquents and societal misfits inevitably said, when he asked them, that they
read lots and lots of horror comics; thus, the comics clearly inspired the evil
people’s later depredations. This seems a ridiculous and illogical stretch nowadays
and was ridiculous to saner voices even in the 1950s, ignoring the simple fact
that far, far, far more people read
these comics and did not turn into
evildoers (not to mention that Wertham’s leading questions, when his research
was not altogether fabricated, invited bad guys to blame what Wertham wanted
them to blame). But it is certainly true that EC aimed at readers beyond the
preteen/teenage years, delving into largely taboo topics such as domestic abuse
(which did not even have that name yet). For instance, one notable story of a
woman constantly abused by a perfectionist husband demanding everything at home
be perfectly arranged, perfectly lined up, perfectly labeled and perfectly
positioned ended with a scene of the numerous perfectly labeled and symmetrically
arranged jars and other containers into which she put all the parts of his
body, from internal organs to fingernails.
That was grisly, to be sure, and over-the-top, but even in our age –
which is so much more tolerant of writing and illustration of horrible things –
nothing in Stuff of Nightmares
matches that sort of tale, however much of a tribute Stine intended. What
readers get in these two comic-book-size collections – illustrated throughout
in dark colors, unlike the deliberately garish ones used in the old comics –
are stories with lots of chopping and slashing and such but without any chills
beyond those offered by Stine in his hyper-popular Goosebumps books.
Of course, that may well be enough for many readers. The Monster Makers is the latest of
innumerable retellings of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,
thoroughly lacking (as do most of these reimaginings) in the original’s
philosophical/theological underpinnings and doing its best to seem up-to-date
through elements such as the livestreaming of a double murder. A mediocre
attempt to make Frankenstein’s monster a sympathetic character, as Shelley did,
here involves making the primary monster a childlike and child-sized being,
complete with diaper, that is given to asking everyone for help and repeatedly
saying “I a monster.” The thoroughly evil human creator of this pathetic little
creature is given to proclamations such as, “I am quivering, electrified by my
own excitement” – reflecting the role of electricity as a force for revival in
Shelley’s novel and a force for whatever is going on in Stine’s story. Readers
with little knowledge of Shelley and less of EC Comics may find this tale at
last mildly thrilling, if scarcely cautionary (unlike Shelley’s: that was its
whole point).
No Holiday for Murder includes
two stories, one involving a killer in the “Murderverse” who becomes a hero to
legions of fans (a scenario with notable and obvious real-world parallels) and
one focusing on a demented mall Santa Claus who goes on a violent crime spree
in which he, among other things, delivers voracious rats to adults and children
alike. In the setup pages surrounding the stories, Stine takes a stab (ha!) at
some of the wryly ghoulish humor of the old EC comics, but his attempts are
scarcely, um, cutting-edge – for instance, he has the Nightmare Keeper’s
“manservant Reggie” bring dinner and say, “I prepared blood sausages, sir. Or
is that joke too obvious?” To which the Nightmare Keeper, breaking the
proverbial fourth wall of the theater, replies, “No jokes are too obvious in a
horror comic, Reggie.” Oh, please.
The Nightmare Keeper himself, with his trenchcoat and goggles, looks more like a pervert-in-training than a creature from the id such as the Crypt Keeper and the Old Witch. This too is a modernization of old comic-book tropes, and this too is a cheapening of them. Stuff of Nightmares is nowhere near as nightmarish as the models on which Stine draws (so to speak: he is the writer; the drawings are by various adequate illustrators). But perhaps the 21st century has enough ongoing real-world horrors so that these comparatively formulaic tales will be a breath of desirably fetid air for those seeking escape of a sort into stories that, if nothing else, have definitive beginnings, middles and endings.
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