October is here and the season of spooks has begun. Ahoy Comics are back with another installment of their anthology series, Edgar Allan Poe’s Snifter of…. and this time around his snifter is filled to the brim with Death. Mark Russell and Peter Snejbjerg kick the book off with another part of their “Monster Serials”. Then, Stuart Moore and Frank Cammuso bring the humorous “Evermore”. And, like all Ahoy books, there’s plenty extra prose with three pieces this time around by Kirk Vanderbeek and John Ficarra. A full snifter indeed.
The Good
Any new “Monster Serials” story is an immediate plus. Russell and Snejbjerg’s series continues to bring the laughs as much as the horror. We just recently got to talk to Russell about what it’s like writing a serious story with such a goofy premise. His writing goes so far to humanize Marquise de Cocoa that you will forget it’s a story about breakfast cereal mascots. Additionally, the artwork by Snejbjerg expertly presents the tale with a reverence you again wouldn’t expect for a cereal mascot. The script and artwork combine for a stellar story.
From there, Moore and Cammuso’s “Evermore” is the perfect companion. Cartoonish and amusing, it’s such a different vibe that it immediately reminds readers why anthology books are so good in the first place. A coming of age story for Poe if you will, the short does more in six pages than many comics try to in 22.
The three prose stories all shine in their own ways. With short stories, the less said the better. They deserve to be read with no prior knowledge, at least for the first reading. More comics really should have some form of prose in them; it’s a really good thing that AHOY’s doing purely by including them. Each story does also have a fantastic illustration to go with it, which should be mentioned.
The ‘Bad’
With books like this it’s difficult to point out any negatives given how much value for money readers are getting. Edgar Allan Poe’s Snifter is the perfect autumnal comic. The variety in the stories means it’s always something new and the horror vibes always go with October. Maybe that’s not for everyone, but scanning the pages for complaints does feel like looking a gift horse in the mouth.
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