Reviews Vincent Price Presents #24

Bluewater's Vincent Price Presents #24 starts-off exceptionally. Pacing is a bit of a lost art in comic books these days -- years of double-page splashes and endless panels of pose do not leave much room for things like form -- and Vincent Price Presents #24 leads with an extended sequence in which we meet our venerable host who deftly reveals our protagonist and sets us on our way. It's a masterful homage to the Golden Age horror comics and it works very well.

Unfortunately, it's a bait and switch. The artwork peters-out very quickly after this, losing literally all of its panache and style, then devolving from there. By the time our situation is underway, the art looks like it was literally drawn in crayon. Manoel Moreira is obviously capable of staged renderings, but he utterly fails at cartooning. He lacks a fundamental knowledge of anatomy or motion and his facial expressions are clumsy stabs at half-formed ideas of what faces should look like. C. Edward Sellner's script follows it down the hole. Like Moreira's art, it starts off competently but gives-up about the time it gets to what should be the meat of the story.

However, Vincent Price Presents #24 is all-ages appropriate and I found myself drawn into it on that level; I'm sure my pre-adolescent self would have enjoyed this comic, though it would never have been a "favorite." It's a decent pick-up for kids, but comics fans are missing only the opening sequence.

© C Harris Lynn, 2010