Curse Review (Michael Moreci, Tim Daniel)

Laney Griffith’s wife was murdered and his son has leukemia. Oh and here’s another kick in the nards: his money’s running out because of the stupid American healthcare system which bankrupts the sick and vulnerable. So when a maniac killer is running about the woods near his home slashing up innocents, Laney’s forced to take a major risk in trying to hunt down the murderer and claim the sizeable bounty. And then he finds out the killer’s a kerazy werewolf, say whaaaaaaat?!

If a comic could be a cheap made for SF Channel movie, it’d be this one. Writers Michael Moreci and Tim Daniel serve up an uninteresting and clichéd horror story with overwrought scenarios, one-dimensional characters, and a predictable plot with one rather large hole. That one would be that when Laney captures the killer, he takes him down to his basement and leaves him there chained up. Why doesn’t he turn him in for the bounty? Who knows. He finds out some information about his wife from the werewolf later on but there’s no way he would’ve known he would get that information so I don’t know why the whole jailer/prisoner scenario was set up.

Laney is your average, uninteresting put-upon father tryna do right by his blah blah, let’s just call it what it is: unconvincing “motivation”. He has some tedious conflict with his sister-in-law sheriff and hillbilly in-and-out-of-jail neighbour, whom he suspects had something to do with his wife’s disappearance. To be fair four issues isn’t a long time to do much but that doesn’t mean a hackneyed story has to be trotted out either. 

I did like one detail which was that the werewolf, when in human form, slowly builds up to the transformation over the course of the month rather than instantly turning at once. That’s a more troubling situation for werewolves and really sells the tragic aspect of their existence. 

Riley Rossmo and Colin Lorimer’s art is definitely the best part of the book. It’s detailed, it’s sleek, it shows a lot of potential, and I liked some scenes’ framing. The art easily outweighs the writing here. The one failing would be, unfortunately, at the crucial part of the story when the resolution to the werewolf and Laney’s story collides and it’s utterly indistinguishable as to who’s doing what on the page. Which character am I looking at? Is that a blur effect or are there really three figures in this panel? Which one is duplicated or are they all dissimilar? It’s like watching a Transformers movie once the good and bad robots start fighting – you can’t tell who’s who!

I can’t recommend Curse – and that’s another thing, “Curse”? Could you come up with a more generic, forgettable, hard to find when typing into a search engine, name for your book?! Then again forgettable is what this comic is so it’s an appropriately chosen title! Curse is a badly written/conceived horror comic that’s definitely miss-able.

Curse