Review – Moon Lake: Volume 1
Review – Moon Lake: Volume 1
CREATED BY: Dan Fogler
WRITTEN BY: Dan Fogler, Brian Holguin, Stef Hutchinson, Blake Leibel, Tim Seeley, R.H. Stavis, Nick Tapalansky
ILLUSTRATED BY: Brooke Allen, Tommy Castillo, Jim Daly, Alex Eckman-Lawn, Mark Englert, Josh Finney, Lizzy John, Scott Newman, Kat Rocha, Robbi Rodriguez, Jeffrey Zornow
Published by : Heavy Metal Magazine
Available: Now
WARNING: ADULT LANGUAGE, IMAGES & THEMES
Synopsis
Moon Lake isn’t just any normal body of water — it’s a mysterious portal into the weird, drawing all manner of macabre mysteries to its shores. In the spirit of the classic horror tales from EC Comics, Moon Lake combines comedy, horror, and adventure into a fantastic anthology, where each story is centred on the strange happenings of Moon Lake.
Dan Fogler, the actor in The Walking Dead and J.K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts films, lends his writing talent to an original new comic book. A mysterious portal into the bizarre and demented. Zombie dinosaurs, a mass-murdering high school cheerleader, and an interdimensional Sasquatch trying to save his species from extinction. All created by the lunar radiation in the small town of Moon Lake.
Writing
Moon Lake volume 1 is a childish, vulgar, irreverent and bawdy collecting of 50s style soft pulp shot stories. Centred around the man in the moon, who farts a lot, because of the moon cheese he eats it sets the weird level immediately with the history of Moon Lake.
The son of the Earth, the Moon, begins to get jealous of all his mother’s attention focussed on the new creatures she had evolved since birthing him. As an act of revenge, when a meteor strikes he sends a chunk himself to Earth and the crater where it landed became Moon Lake.
Fogler acts a bit like a naughty schoolboy here, giggling at naked women, sex and excretions. It’s all been down before and save for some of the amazing art most of the short stories are unforgettable and disposable. It’s the humour of 12-year-old boys and old men.
The best story the Queen of Denial, about a perfect cheerleader struck by lightning, has a Wizard of Oz feel. Her mind gives up and she sees gum-drops and teddy bears while wielding axes, swords and the like to kill as many as possible. That this the best of a bad bunch tells you what to expect.
Artwork
You could throw a stick at Moon Lake and hit a boatload of talented artists, but you could also hit a few idiots that escaped from Mad Magazine and have come along for the ride. The amazing artwork in Balck Bear Blues, Moon Wars and Queen of Denial is stunning. Colours and artwork explode as guts, viscera and various appendages fly out of the page at the reader. I’ve added a few galleries of pages from each story below.
Overall Thoughts
Perhaps I am being too hard on the writers and artists that collaborated on Moon Lake but if you rely 100% on stunning artwork your short stories better be world-class. They’re not this time. We’re at 80s sex comedies level here (think Flesh Gordon meets Porkys.) Thank god we’ve moved on since these days.
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