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Tuesday 25 February 2020

Bone Parish, Volume 1 Review (Cullen Bunn, Jonas Scharf)


Cullen Bunn’s cornered the market on shitty horror-themed comics – you wanna read something mega-dull with the superficial genre trappings of horror? He’s your dude! He’s like a one-man Hammer Horror of comics except his stuff isn’t even entertaining on a campy level.

Bone Parish is his latest crud-bucket of images and words. Set in N’Orleans, some family has magically puzzled out how to make an addictive street drug from corpses that makes you hallucinate said corpses’ life experiences: if they was a rock star, you get to experience being a rock star, if they was a porn star, etc. Some other crime family is muscling in on their hustle and bang bangs happen. Sound meet Fury and signify one big Nuthin!

It’s not even worth pointing out how such a drug could possibly work (how do you select the experience you’re after?), not least because this is a fantasy, but because the book has much bigger flaws. The premise might’ve been interesting in the hands of a more capable writer but Bunn fluffs it up. There’s barely any horror or crime – the piss-poor story is basically a shitty family melodrama peopled by instantly forgettable, unlikeable non-entities. I cared about these nobodies so little that when some started getting bumped off I barely noticed let alone felt anything! The art – whatever.

Boring Parish is the comics version of some bland, sub-Netflix TV show you’ll never watch and couldn’t imagine the audience for - in other words, Cullen Bunn does it again! He has written some quality horror comics in the past though and I recommend Death Follows or his Night of the Living Deadpool series for Marvel instead of this drek.

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