I have just read the first story, and I'll take the plunge by being first to comment on it.
The dialogue and the artwork were okay, but there were two problems that kept the story from really engaging me.
The first problem was the vast lack of any "sympathetic character" whom I could really care about in the part set in the "modern day." (Modern when the comic was published, anyhow.) Sure, I could feel mildly sorry for the original Ira Sumner, but he's already been dead for a century or so before we ever learn about it in a flashback, so it wasn't as if I were thinking: "Gee, I sure hope he survives somehow!" Besides, he was only onstage for a few panels; not long enough for me to be enthralled by the guy's charm or anything. (Then his ghost comes back on the final page of the story, but is such a nasty and unjust customer at this point that any faint sympathy I once felt for the living Ira Sumner is suddenly eliminated from my mind, never to return.)
The second problem with the story was the vast lack of any modern-day "evil character" whom I really wanted to see suffer and die in the part set in the "modern day." I sure didn't like the mid-20th-Century Caleb Dodge (descendant of his murderous namesake), but I didn't hate him with a burning passion and want to see him die a terrible death. After all, he isn't to blame for the terrible choices made by his great-grandfather, is he? And he wasn't committing any crime, was he? He just had a forceful personality and he didn't believe that any supernatural "curse" was responsible for fatal injuries to some of his workmen. But I didn't see him holding a gun to anyone's head to keep that man from quitting if he was scared of ending up the same way. (There is one panel in which the possibility of "shanghaiing" is mentioned, but no hard evidence that this ever actually occurred. By the mid-Twentieth Century, it wasn't easy to get away with that kind of thing, was it? And when the refurbished yacht finally is ready to sail, the captain offers triple pay to men who then choose to sign up despite the perceived risks.)
With only seven panels left in the story (bottom right corner of the next-to-last page), we are suddenly told that the murdered Ira Sumner has a distant descendant of the same name who wanted to get revenge. Since there was no hint of the existence of any such character until after the fellow was caught red-handed, I didn't feel nearly as much interest in this "revelation" as the writer apparently hoped I would.
What do I care if a Total Stranger, suddenly popping up out of thin air and promptly getting captured, is named "Ira Sumner" or something else entirely? It's like having a murder mystery say: "The butler did it!" when the butler has gotten no character development until that moment. (Although we usually at least knew there was, in fact, a butler in the house.)
Then we are told that Modern Ira wanted to kill Modern Caleb in reprisal for what Old Caleb did to Old Ira. (I had to invent these names to make it clear what I was talking about.) That makes Modern Ira a bloodthirsty villain or lunatic himself (since the only man who ever killed a member of his family already got his just desserts a hundred years ago, and Modern Caleb has never harmed any member of the Sumner clan in any way, so far as we can tell!). Which means I don't shed any tears over the revelation that Modern Ira was babbling like a lunatic when the authorities found him later.
Likewise, I found it hard to love or hate Captain Snow. So it all comes back to what I said at the beginning -- I didn't much care about any of the major characters in the story, so it scarcely mattered to me which ones lived or died!
I've seen horror stories in which a fairly nice person suffered (or narrowly avoided) an utterly undeserved horrific fate and so I felt shaken by what had just happened. I've also seen horror stories in which the protagonist is such a nasty, cold-blooded creep that I end up feeling a smug feeling of satisfaction, as in: "Yup, he brought it upon himself!" when he dies in agony (or whatever nasty fate befalls him). But this story falls somewhere in between, with death and insanity only being visited upon people who didn't get me very passionate about them in any way!
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Topic: Week 87 - Dark Mysteries #1 (Read 4630 times)
