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REVIEW - Sullengrey: Cemetery Things GN
Original review posted here: http://www.brokenfrontier.com/reviews/details.php?id=1773
Sullengrey: Cemetery Things GN
Review by Dave Baxter, posted March 17, 2008
Words: Jocelyn GajewayPencils: Drew Rausch
Inks: Drew Rausch
Colors: Drew Rausch
Story Title: Cemetery Things
Publisher: Ape Entertainment
Price: $19.95
Release Date: March 12, 2008
Sullengrey follows the exploits of Grey, a fair-skinned, dark-featured lad whose best friend is a Grim Reaper plush doll. He’s a boy that wears a substantially wide scarf to cover an odd skin condition about his mouth (amongst other places), and he lives within a cemetery, talks to the dead, and remains tortured by his past. The town that he and his cemetery are a part of—Autumn’s Grove—is a pleasant place, though its pleasantness was long-ago carved into being by the locale’s many buried sins. Now, both Grey and Autumn’s Grove are about to be discovered and uncovered by young photographer Salam, a girl that’ll stop at nothing to determine the horrors that lurk beneath the surface of Autumn’s Grove.
That sounds serious, and it is, but Sullengrey is not a straight-forward horror book. It’s flavored by the more glamorous elements of the genre, the gothic and the goth, the kitschy and the comedic. Creator Drew Rausch is best known for working on SLG’s The Haunted Mansion and Tokyopop’s The Dark Goodbye, and any who’ve seen his highly expressionistic Cabinet of Doctor Caligari style angular art will have a solid idea on what to expect. Think the metaphysical and urban-surreal qualities of Ted McKeever mixed with a hefty dose of irreverence and true-blue horror à la Little Scrowlie and Dogwitch.
Scripted by Jocelyn Gajeway, she pens this inaugural volume with a disconcerting (though arguably effective) blend of sincerity, dramatic credibility, and schlock-fest B-movie banter and bathos. The story is staunchly self-aware of its style and intent, its goals and its genre influence-provenance. In a way, this makes for a nearly deconstructionist goth horror epic, a story that is to the dark and weird sequential what Cemetery Man was to the giallo. Often, I wanted less whimsy than Gajeway and Rausch chose to pack into Cemetery Things, as I found the rhythm of serious to flippant to be executed in too haphazard a fashion, but then this flip-flop is a part of what Sullengrey owes its existence to: a genre that mashes cute and utterly moribund into one seamless whole. There are moments to chill the blood, to raise an eyebrow at the writers’ overly wry modernist flourishes, to gasp at for sheer cool and well-played shock factor.
Though chock full of excellent sequences, Sullengrey, at least in this first volume, does fail to establish a voice and stick to it. It a way, the creators seem to flounder now and again at trying to define what they’re ultimately going to be - what part horror and what part humor? Where to establish the expository backstory, in what form, with what sensibility? More than once Gajeway and Rausch poke at a story element a few times before simply spitting it out in exasperation, and in all such instances, the revelations fall flat, too sudden and offered in a method unbecoming to the rest of the saga’s nuance. But in both story and art, Cemetery Things does manage a steady growth and maturation from issue to issue (or in this collection’s case, chapter to chapter), both creators noticeably coming into their own by the fourth and final installment.
This transitions us nicely to a paragraph about Rausch’s artwork: it begins as eye-catching, though comparatively (comparative to where it arrives at the end) it’s an awkward thing. Rausch has since become a smooth, polished, and atmospheric illustrator, though three out of Cemetery Things’ four chapters are pre-Rausch-the-Amazing and lean more toward Rausch-the-Overly-Hyper. His early pages are kinetic and overworked to the point of appearing like Keith Giffen on something decidedly illicit, and his digital coloring, while nothing offensive, is simple and flat in the way most early digital coloring appeared, once upon a time (and still often does). However, Cemetery Things is Rausch’s caterpillar cocoon, and by the final episode he bursts forth from an artist’s chrysalis as a 
beautiful, beautiful butterfly, his colors and his linework some of the very best since Ben Templesmith first came onto the scene and showed horror fans how it could and should be done.
Final verdict: Sullengrey is going to be pretty goddamned cool from hereon out, and it is, in the final moments of Cemetery Things, but its beginning bits may be too raw for some. If you’re already a fan of gothic horror and especially the more fanciful small press and manga-derived "cute" goth horror, then even the early chapters will hardly have you batting an eye. Cemetery Things suffers from certain storytelling potholes, an uneven narrative that rattles as often as it offers a smooth silky ride, but by and large, the creators do seem to get it under control before the back cover is closed.
The story itself is engaging, and the sequel looks to surpass the beginning in every way. I’d recommend CT mostly for what’s to come, rather than on its own merits alone, but that’s still a mighty big merit, and depending on how much does come after this, perhaps a bigger and better merit than being the only good volume of a longer, poorer epic. I get the feeling this’ll be the reverse: a shaky beginning to an awesome ongoing.
Be sure to check out the book’s official website: http://www.sullengrey.com/
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