Created a page for Hill House Comics.
Read the first issue of The Dollhouse Family. I like it — Mike Carey and Peter Gross work really well together, having previously done Lucifer and The Unwritten, and you can tell. I like that it transitions from the past to present (well, 1980s present) to the past again and I don't know yet where it's going with some things.
Alice, the main character, gets an antique dollhouse from her great-aunt and soon finds that if she says a certain phrase, she can shrink down and play with people inside, who are all real. But then someone mentions there's a "Black Room" in the dollhouse. Meanwhile, her father is abusive to her mother to the point where she knows that her mother is probably going to die — and inside the Black Room, a voice tells her that they can stop her father, but it would mean Alice would have to stay inside the dollhouse forever.
And Alice doesn't take the deal. Instead, she bludgeons her father with a hammer. Something I did not expect.
The first issue was definitely more exciting than Basketful of Heads, but I also have no idea where it's going.
These are the comics that Joe Hill is curating for DC Black Label. The first two, Basketful of Heads and The Dollhouse Family have come out, with two more (The Low, Low Woods and Daphne Byrne) coming out next month, I believe.
And since I'm a big horror fan, I've decided to get them all. I'll probably be making pages for them (as well as Hill House Comics in general) after I read the first issues of each.
So far, I've read the first issue of Basketful of Heads (written by Joe Hill, art by Leomacs) and it's good. It's a slow issue — probably considered the first chapter of a book, since Hill is a novelist, too — but it sets a lot of things in motion. We get a lot of character introductions and a look at the Norse axe that will become important, but aside from that, nothing really happens. Sure, we see the basketful of heads and axe in the opening page, but that's a flashforward. I kind of expected with a name like Basketful of Heads that we would get a beheading in the first issue, but we don't.
I will say, however, that the art is gorgeous.
The backup story, "Sea Dogs," was good, too. It was about the Revolutionaries in the American Revolution using werewolves against the British. It's a fun "What If?" type, but I wonder how they are going to maintain it.