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Comic Review: The Evil Inside #2
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Ryan Midnight   |  

Evil InsideThe Evil Inside #2
Writer: Bart A. Thompson
Illustrators: Chris Kohler,
Michele Buscalferri, and
Alex Massacci
Lettering: B. Alex Thompson
Approbation Comics
Cover Price $3.50; Available Now

Writer and CEO of Approbation Comics Bart A. Thompson returns for a second go-around of short anthology horror stories with a different artist penciling each story. This time around, Thompson strays a bit from the Tales From The Crypt dark-humored twists, and though each story retains a “gotcha” ending, his artists decide to all but abandoned any thematic linking the EC Comics art style.

In “Identity,” a young man awakens in an alley, unaware of who he is and why he is beat up, but senses that there is someone after him. As he makes his way out of the alleyways, he comes across an equally beaten young woman, who is shaken by whoever attacked her. The amnesiac takes the woman, practically by force, back to a familiar building to both defend her and protect himself. But as he makes his way through the building, fragmented memories begin to needle him in the back of his mind. Who is he, and why does this apartment building look so familiar?

Chris Kohler provides the pencils for this crime mystery story, going for as realistic black and white artwork as he can wring out of his pen. Thompson starts the story right off in the middle of things doesn’t let up till the final panel, in which the curtain is pulled back in this Memento-esque take on amnesia and memory loss.

The second story, “A Slight Period Of Adjustment,” focuses on an overprotective single dad who is also a cop. When Lucian comes to pick up his teenage daughter Sara for a date, the dad takes one look at the long-haired, leather-duster-clad goth and decides that something is amiss. He uses his tools of the trade to take a look at Lucian’s past, but doesn’t find anything out of the ordinary. But his overprotective parenting radar still will not turn off. And it is this heightened paranoia about Lucian that will serve as the catalyst for more damage than he could ever possibly imagine.

On tap for art this time around is Michele Buscalferri, whose high contrast black and white art looks like Frank Miller crossed with the standard cutesy artwork of Oni Press. Thompson’s choice in his artist reflects well on his horror-pop meets religion collision of a story. The problem with Thompson’s story choice here is that given the set up, he forces the story to go either one of two ways, and neither of which are particularly exciting or original, and as the shortest of the stories in Issue 2, he is unable to flesh out an idea that could easily take up an entire issue.

Thompson wraps this issue up with “Was He Asking For It?” Here, after carefully selecting his target, a street hooligan robs a flashy pimp and his two female companions of their jewelry and wallets. But when he tries to sell the stuff at a pawn shop, he discovers all of the jewelry is junk. Frustrated, the determined thief heads off to the pimp’s apartment address he gets from the driver’s license in the stolen wallet, unaware he is following a pre-ordained chain of events.

Alex Massacci rounds out the trio of artists on this last story, and keeps with the high-contrast black and white styling of the previous story, with just a dash of underlying evil in all of his characters to keep you guessing their true identities. Thompson’s thematic retread of the story “Word Is Bond” found is the first issue is a little bit of a downer to end the book on, since we have essentially already read this story, but Thompson switches everything up just enough to make this work as a companion story instead of a retelling.

After such a strong start with Issue 1, the second issue of this miniseries anthology is a bit of a disappointment. Like an M. Night Shyamalan movie, by the end of the third story here (and now the sixth in the series) we’ve grown so accustomed to Thompson’s 1-2 set up n’ zing that the endings become a ho-hum “gotcha…” than the “gotcha!” they should be. Still, this little dip is not enough to write off the series, and perhaps Thompson’s bigger goal of this issue is to get the reader into a false sense of what to accept and then really go for jugular!

Available at IndyPlanet.

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