Jughead: The Hunger #2

Halloween 2019 Post-A-Day 2

Horror-ible

Jughead: The Hunger #2

We all know “Were” this is going

"Run Like a Wolf, Part 2”

Writer – Frank Tieri

Artists – Pat & Tim Kennedy and Joe Eisma

Inker – Bob Smith

Colorist – Matt Herms

Letterer –Jack Morelli

Editor – Alex Segura and Jamie Lee Rotante

Editor-in-Chief – Victor Gorelick

February 2018

Having struck gold with Afterlife with Archie(2013) and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina(2014), Archie publishing decided to setup the Archie Horror/Archie’s Madhouse imprint and produce a one-shot werewolf tale called Jughead: The Hunger in March of 2017. Strong sales lead to the announcement of an ongoing in July and by October of that same year Archie was churning out the fur and fangs.

When I scooped this out of the Half-Price bin I had high hopes. Both of the prior Archie Horror titles had worked amazingly well. Taking little bits of the familiar Archie universe and twist them in macabre, violent tales of terror turned out to be just the right mix to make my neck hairs stand on end.

It is with a heavy heart that I admit that Jughead’s werewolf adventures didn’t do it for me. Maybe it is coming in an issue late? Maybe it is fatigue at seeing these beloved characters bite it a different way? Maybe I just don’t dig werewolf stories?

I gonna go with none of those. I feel like I gave this issue a fair shake to wow me, but it just didn’t. Let’s jump right in and see if we can uncover why.

We begin with a rock-solid opening idea: Riverdale High principal Mr. Weatherbee is seated at his desk as late evening light shines in from the window. He is bemoaning the past and bringing us up to speed on goings-on in Riverdale. 

In the frontispiece it states that Jughead’s legendary hunger stemmed from an undiscovered strain of lycanthropy. A discovery that turns dark when it comes to light that the lad is also the infamous serial killer The Riverdale Ripper. This is discovered by Archie and Betty, who come upon Jughead munching on Reggie, who is dead in the first issue. Jughead skips town to avoid being hunted down. Betty and Archie take off with her werewolf-hunting cousins to take care of Jughead permanently.

Unfortunately for Mr. Weatherbee, the hunters have left some unfinished business in Riverdale.

And that business happens to be Reggie himself, who has risen as a werewolf and who also wants revenge on Jughead for his untimely turning. And he is not ashamed of using his new powers to begin creating a wolfpack of his own to do just that. Ms. Grundy was a meal…

Mr. Weatherbee…turns out to be not so lucky.

Reggie’s startling transformation terrifies our balding administrator and he flees. Seems his escape is cut off by Reggie’s cohort…

…Veronica! Who has been turned into a werewolf by Reggie and is also upset that Betty has Archie all to herself as they follow Jughead’s trail. So, in essence this is all Jughead’s fault. At least that’s how Veronica sees it as she and Reggie take a bite out of Mr. Weatherbee.

  

Solid first five pages. Not sure what’s not to like, right? Well, it is something about this next part, where we catch up to Betty and Archie as Archie has to prove his manliness to cousin Bo. There’s a page of Archie dodging punches and on the following he lays one right into Bo’s kisser. 

The love tap is so hard it knocks one of Bo’s teeth out. This whole bit seems so “un-Archie”-like that I’m left wondering who these characters are. A lot of the fun of the books is seeing the Archie kids played out in a tad bit more realistic way, but still generally the same as their old-school namesakes. Here we have a completely hard Betty and Archie, and I’m not comfortable with this shift in their personalities. It makes it more difficult to connect with them when confronting horrors if they are already full on terminators. Maybe it’s just me.

However, I don’t think so as writer Tieri now curves us toward something that will soften Archie, which is his inexperience handling firearms.

But even with doing that we let it drop that Betty is secretly teen-Rambo, so it doesn’t completely fix the issue. There needs to be some vulnerability on the part of our heroes, which I believe the book is clearly missing. This last image of Archie looking scared is a too little, too late for my tastes.

And for a book called “The Hunger,” that’s exactly what drives Jughead out of hiding. He and Hot Dog are hold up in a motel room eating delivery, but it’s doing a number on the pooch’s stomach. So now Jughead has to travel into town to buy some actual dog food, a terrifying prospect because his picture is being shown around as the latest suspect in the Riverdale Ripper investigation. 

His fears are well-founded. At the checkout, he is identified by the cashier…

Sadly, I don’t know if this is an empty threat or not. Jughead here seems like his old self. Maybe he does have awesome werewolf powers, but he doesn’t act like that has changed him. In fact the book should actually have taken this in a darker direction, for my tastes. Have Jughead shown being tempted to eat fresh kills by his werewolf side, have him agonizing over having killed Reggie. Something. Jughead’s traumatic curse needs to have some emphasis here.

Instead we have a short bit where Jughead talks to his dog and then goes to the store afraid of being caught by police. Which is exactly where we end up…

…along with the horror of a badly printed page. Wonder how many of these slipped through the Q&A process?

 

Next page we take the questionable story turn of moving back to Archie and Betty as they inquire at the circus where Jughead got a job immediately after leaving Riverdale. Appears he might have eaten one of the circus freaks and they all sign on to get revenge or something similarly silly. It is an out of pace three pages, when we have an exciting confrontation that we just cut away from. The only interesting thing it establishes is that clan Cooper has a head named Elena that Archie and Betty have to check out.

Only then do we cut back to Jughead’s bad trip to the grocery store. Looks like our werewolf boy is pretty boned. Cops know who he is and the clerk even comes out to personally ID him. Which happens to end badly for the store clerk.

Looks like he should have stayed inside. He’s gutted by a different werewolf and my red herring sense goes off as this new furbag starts cutting his way through the officers. In the end both the werewolf and Jughead escape.

But it isn’t like they teamed up or something. Jughead is clearly trying to evade both his pursuers. Unfortunately, the werewolf just caught up.

If you are assuming this is Reggie and the series’ major confrontation is about to be over, I got news for you: No. Such. Luck.

Nope! What we end up with is Jughead’s cousin Bingo, a minor character that I have never encountered before. And that’s where we end, with Bingo promising to open Jughead’s eyes to the good life of gutting people with your own fangs and claws.

This series got three complete arcs in 13 issues and a crossover with the Archie vampire horror series “Vampironica”. If the decline in quality continued in that series, I’m not certain I want to find one of them.

Battlestar Galactica #10

Halloween 2019 Post-A-Day 1

Horror-ible and Tie-ins

Battlestar Galactica #10

Kicking Halloween off with a scary giant space testicle

"This Planet Hungers”

Writer – Tom DeFalco

Pencils – Pat Broderick

Inker – Barreto & Marcos

Colorist – Ben Sean

Letterer – John Costanza

Editor – Allen Milgrom

Editor-in-Chief – Jim Shooter

December 1979

No, I haven’t died.

I mean, I could easily see why you would think that. However, it isn’t remotely the case. I think. I think I’m still alive. Maybe someone should check on me just in case though? I might be mistaken.

Not that it would matter in October because this month is Halloween post-a-day and even being dead won’t allow me to stop the post train from rolling down the tracks. “Whoo-whoo, mothertrucker!”

Our first stop this pumpkin-spice season is the depths of outer space, as the Crapbox travels back to my yesteryear and a little-loved yet fondly remembered version of the show called Battlestar Galactica. The Crapbox may have visited this neck of the woods before, I can’t really be certain. Too much time away from what I’ve reviewed will do that to an aged brain like mine.

What you need to know is that this Marvel book popped out alongside the original 1978 TV series, lasted 23 issues, and the faded alongside the show. Like Marvel’s Star Wars before it, some of those issues were illustrated by such talented hands as Walt Simonson, Rich Buckler, Klaus Janson, Sal Buscema, and (our artists on this issue) Pat Broderick with Eduardo Barreto and Pablo Marcos. Our writer this outing was Tom DeFalco, still on his way up to his own stint as EIC.

Being 10 issues down the chain we are well past the actual recap of the television movie (the magazine format graphic novel of which had secured the book a ongoing) which was sliced into the first three issues. The adaptation of the two-part TV episode “Lost Planet of the Gods” appeared as issues 4 and 5. 

But by issue 10, BSG the comic book and diverged greatly from BSG the TV series. At this point in the comic story our wagon-master to the stars, Commander Adama, got himself trapped in a dream state courtesy of a technological memory simulator. Sadly, instead of finding info that would lead the BSG fleet to the lost 13^th tribe of humanity, Adama just found his dreams were jumping off points for stories of past conflicts with the robotic Cylons.

No doubt this was done to keep the book somewhat behind the TV series so they didn’t wildly diverge from each other.

Whatever the purpose, what we get is this tale of terror in space care of Lorne Greene in a big snow globe. Our lead-in is these nice exterior shots of the Galactica…

…followed by Apollo racing to check on his Father’s state. It is currently unchanged.

But as Apollo, Athena, Starbuck and Tigh look on, we get the start of our flashback story. Something that happened to Apollo and Starbuck far back during the war with the Cylons…but strangely is known about in such complete detail by Captain Adama that he can remember their parts of the story too…

It begins when the Galactica’s long-range scanners notice a strange, huge blip on their radars. Adama sends his two best pilots to investigate.

They are shocked at what they find! Mainly because it happens to be a giant floating space-testicle. 

Okay, so maybe at first they think it’s a rogue planet or something, but soon the evidence of their scanners…

…and their experiences, lean toward this being something completely different. 

And you’d think that a place this weird would put both of them off, but THEN you’d remember that this was the 1978’s version of Starbuck, a man desperately trying to beat Jim Kirk’s “girl in every port” score. And I think he would follow through on that promise if it wasn’t for these plants…

…that sexually assault Apollo. Try figuring out what hashtags to add to that #METOO movement, A-Paul. Just like in the best Japanese Henti, the plant tentacles spooge their nasty gas all over Apollo and then retreat, with Starbuck’s gunfire to hasten their farewell.

The gents hate to “be groped and run” but they’ve had enough mistreatment at the various appendages of this unknown moon. So back to Galactica they race.

And they arrive just in time for Starbuck to come down with a mysterious case of “space herpies” or perhaps “space face-herpies?” Looks like the boys should wear full body condoms whenever they go for a spacewalk.

As for it being “a gag,” NO, but your face is now making me gag!

I shouldn’t be quite so hard on Starbuck, as his aliment appears to be more than just surface grossness. And it appears to be catchy. 

Something on the mysterious planet of probing tentacle plants has gotten him genuinely sick. And that highly contagious whatever infects Apollo’s kid brother Zac in a matter of seconds. So sick, he faints right into Apollo’s arms.

Within a few hours or “centars” or whatever made-up time unit we are dealing with here the ship is ravaged by this plague that makes people look super-gross and unable to get a date for their high school prom. Also, there is some nonsense about it being spread telepathically.

To make matters worse, there are three Base Stars rapidly closing in on them, forming a pincher that is forcing them closer to the giant infectious space testicle. Galactica is truly caught between a robot death squad “rock” and a sweaty diseased ballsack of a “hard place.”

Meanwhile, in quarantine Apollo is having nightmares of being groped by an alien planet, which I’d say is pretty standard for someone who has been touched inappropriately by an entire world’s worth of tentacles. Kid needs some counseling. 

Or something else? Apollo goes nuts and breaks out. While on the other side of the ship, Adama makes the decision to wipe out space ball’s threat to humanity.

He has to put those plans on hold as Apollo (using a leg longer than his entire body) takes out a guard, steals a viper and heads for the planet’s surface.

Not that it’s a long trip, as we can see in the next shot. Galactica looks to be dangerously close to getting tangled in some space-pubes. Adama isn’t about to stop his countdown though, and I’m assuming he feels the three Base Stars will take down Galactica anyway. That would account for his unfeeling attitude at nuking his son alongside the giant space nut. 

That telepathic plague has something else in mind, however. Adama finds he can’t order his ship to fire on the planet. All this, while Apollo is apparently getting kinky by making “physical contact” with the planet tentacles on the surface.

All hope appears lost as the testicle’s pseudopods reach out for Galactica and the basestars send out wave-upon-wave of Cylon raiders…

…only for the twist of the story to come: the living testicle is a GOOD GUY! He (naw, I didn’t check its gender in terms of the story, but take my word for it. This one is a “he.”) destroys the basestars and saves Galactica…

…and afterwards explains that the plague was just its attempts at telepathic communication. Also it mentions being hungry for companionship, which is weird given that Adama’s son is on the surface in “physical contact” with this weird giant space ball. 

Regardless, Adama realizes he was wrong the entire time…and as the page count at the bottom shows us, he’s out of story time too. Back to the memory-flashback wrapper we go. Back to more warnings that if they don’t free Adama soon he’ll die lost in his own memory. No mention is made of what happen to the very handy giant moving killer space testicle and why it isn’t being used to destroy more Base Stars.

Although, there is a “next issue” blurb about “Scavengers World!” staring in issue number 11. An issue with art by the amazing Walt Simonson inked by the astonishing Klaus Jansen. An issue free of planet-sized, scary space testicles.

They didn’t have the balls to bring it up again, apparently.