Review - Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The Lovecraftian Horror (Originally posted October 3, 2009)

Ok so this is my first review. I’m going to use a 1-10 rating on reviews only because I feel that a rating system of 1-5 makes some ratings to close. So now that I got that out of the way the book I will be reviewing is titled “Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The Lovecraftian Horror.”

Graphic novels look so much better on a book shelf then your regular comics and this one is no exception. The book is a beautiful yet horrific looking piece that I will enjoy having on my book shelf. The covers use mostly that sickly blackish green coloring that can only be attributed to horror. It has a high gloss finish as well which keeps it looking sharp and clean. It is perfect bound and the pages are held together very well with none coming loose. The only thing I found that was not perfect was a couple of words that had typos but you can find that in just about anything and there was one part where the text was completely duplicated for about half a paragraph. That muddled up my reading for a second but it was quickly overcome and did not distract nor detract from the story.

This is a Trade Paperback (TPB) or graphic novel whichever term you prefer to use. It is based on a combination of two things; one the character of Carl Kolchak from the 1970’s television show "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" and two the mythos derived from the works of turn of the 20th century horror writer Howard Phillip Lovecraft. The Kolchak character is a cult favorite and the show has been credited as one of the inspirations of shows like The X-Files. H.P. Lovecraft has been credited by many modern day horror writers as being a major influence in their work. Many elements from his works can be found in works of writers such as Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Clive Barker.

I was very excited when I picked up this book as both Kolchak: The Night Stalker and the works of Lovecraft are favorites of mine. So when I saw them together I was suddenly hit with the idea ‘why didn’t anyone think of this sooner?’ The two go hand in hand. Now I will admit that I may be a bit biased as I have a great liking for both of the subjects but I will try to be impartial.

The book is published by an Illinois comic publishing company by the name of Moonstone Books. They have several titles using the Kolchak character but this is the only one, so far, dealing with the subject of Lovecraft fiction. Story was written by C. J. Henderson and illustrations by Jaime Calderon. I got my copy at Gencon in 2008.

It is as I said a TPB and is 96 pgs long. They did something a bit different than you might see in a ‘normal’ TPB in that they used a style they refer to as ‘Widevision’. What this means basically is the illustration is split over two pages in a spread causing a ‘crossover’ effect, half the image on the left page and half on the right. All the illustrations are set in the center of the page vertically from top to bottom, causing there to be black areas where the text of the story is typed in at the top and bottom of each page. The affect was used on each page with the exception of page 1 and page 96 which had their own illustration each. Page 1 was a front facing page and page 96 was a back facing page so they did not have a corresponding page that they could do a crossover with. What the affect of this ‘Widevision’ did was to make it almost feel like you were watching something on a widescreen TV. Total there were only 50 illustrations but they were really good. Some where just down right creepy. The only other illustration was on the cover which is an image of Kolchak looking over his shoulder at a wide eyed horrific creature of some type. The art work is wonderfully done and did as much to convey feeling and tone as any of the words.

The ‘Widevision’ also gave the writer a lot of space to narrate their story. There was enough text here that it felt more like I was reading a 15-20 page short story than a comic. There are no word bubbles but rather just plain typed text. It gave it a different feeling than any comic I’ve read before. I really liked this style. As far as the story went it was very well crafted. The writer did a great job of getting that feeling of dread that Lovecraft was masterful at as well as giving me a taste of what the old Kolchak character was like. The story is all told from first person narrative of Kolchak and I found myself reading the lines in my head in that voice that could only be delivered by the late Darren McGavin I thought the writer did an incredible job of merging the two styles seamlessly. He’s done other work pertaining to the Cthulhu/Lovercraft mythos so he really knows his stuff. I’m looking forward to reading other works by Henderson.

So here’s the hard part. I need to rate this book without my personal bias for the subject matter of the story. Minuses for the duplicated text and the typos I found, I will give this book 9 out of 10. If you are a fan of horror, Lovecraft or Kolchak (like me) you can consider this book a 10.