The Architect TPB
By Mike Baron & Andie Tong
Big Head Press
Cover Price: $9.95; Available Now

I’ve never been a big fan of horror in comics, preferring to get my terror fix from novels and movies. But a recent appreciation for horror comics from the EC library, along with a long-time love of architecture, made me jump at the chance to review the The Architect. This graphic novel collects the online comic by scribe Mike Baron and artist Andie Tong, and is advertised as being a horror story loosely based on the life of famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Roark Dexter Smith is man whose talents far exceed his Frank-Lloyd-Wright-esque gift for architectural design. He’s also an black arts devotee who belongs to a cult of druids who worship mushrooms. Everything comes together when Roark begins building his crowning achievement, The Bluff House, in the wilds of Wisconsin. But things go terribly wrong when a fire devastates the project and Roarke, his wife, and his assistant end up mysteriously missing.

We then jump ahead several years, and architect Gil Topper finds out that he’s the long-lost heir to The Bluff House. He decides to refurbish the project with the help of his friends (a clever way of racking up the body count!) so they can build a co-op where they will all live together. But the house has been constructed on top of the world’s largest fungus spore, and our protagonists soon discover that evil can take many forms. What follows is a haunted house tale with a twist, as Gil and his friends struggle to survive killer berries, demonic toilets, and other horrors.

The story itself is well-written, but I would expect nothing less from the guy who gave us such classics as Badger and Nexus. The plot moves ahead at a brisk pace with the settings and main characters fairly well defined along the way. Flashes of humor and a few interesting twists keep things entertaining, but don’t detract from the overall narrative. The problem for me was the art. It’s not that Andie Tong did a bad job… far from it… the guy is an excellent artist who has a brilliant instinct for interesting camera angles and clean lines. It’s just that Tong’s manga-like stylings didn’t seem to fit very well for this type of horror story. The subterranean end-game was begging for a much creepier treatment, and the book would have had greater impact had it been rendered by somebody more in the vein of Bernie Wrightson or Gene Colan.

I recommend The Architect as a quick “horror-light” kind of read. The story isn’t particularly scary, but it is entertaining. The full-color graphic novel has a retail price of $9.95, runs 70 pages, and includes a 7-page bonus tale by Baron. You can still read the original story online as well, courtesy of Big Head Press.