Flayed Corpse and Other Stories is a decent anthology of horror comics mostly by Josh Simmons.
I enjoyed the two longest stories here, the best one being The Incident at Owl’s Head where a drifter is taken in by a gay weirdo called Ambrose who seems to run the small town and everyone’s in thrall to. I read the Ambrose Bierce short story An Occurrence at Owl’s Creek Bridge years ago but I can’t remember what happened in it so I’m not sure why this story is referencing it or what similarities it shares.
Still, the atmosphere is pleasantly creepy, there are some imaginative and unsettling scenes - the drifter seemingly melting into the bookshop’s floor for no reason and Ambrose’s gross eating habits - and it was unpredictable. Good stuff!
The other story I liked was a Batman and Joker pastiche. “Batman” and “Joker” make their way across a post-apocalyptic landscape (that Joker probably brought about) and Batman is searching for survivors while bringing Joker along as his prisoner. Except Joker goes too far, snaps Batman’s already-fragile mind and shit gets crazy!
You don’t have to be a Batman fan to enjoy that one but I think if you are then you’ll like it more (assuming you have a sense of humour!). It’s very silly and amusing and, again, I had no clue where it was headed either as it was so off-the-rails bonkers.
Some of the humour of the other stories was too juvenile (“The Great Shitter” about a giant monster that literally shits continuously on a town) and a lot of the stories were flatly unoriginal (“psycho killer menacing isolated people” was a trope that came up several times). But while the majority of the stories were either completely throwaway or unmemorable, they’re at least readable and the varied art is interesting.
Flayed Corpse and Other Stories is no must-read anthology but, if you’re into horror comics, you’ll probably find something entertaining here.
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