Basketful of Heads Review (Joe Hill, Leomacs)

It’s September 1983, ‘cos the ‘80s is in these days, in a small coastal Maine town and June and her cop boyfriend Liam are busy being young and sexy. BUT DEN. Some inmates from the local prison break out - wuh oh! And then a storm hits, stranding everyone on the small archipelago - say whaaa! And June finds a magical axe from Norse mythology that keeps decapitated heads alive after it separates them from the body - hhwugiuhdsh! Time for… something… make it through the night/storm ok, I guess?

Like Bendis’ Jinxworld and Wonder Comics labels, DC has given another big name writer - Joe “Dad Writes Better Books Than Me” Hill King - their own line to lord over. This is Hill House Comics boyyyy, full of fresh, original horror titles spearheaded by this, also written by Hill: Basketful of Heads. And it’s baaaad!

I suppose the ingredients are there for a potentially decent story but Hill doesn’t pull it off and things get repetitive very quickly. June encounters a one-dimensional bad guy - and EVERY guy she meets is a POS - she lops his head off lickity-split and adds it to her basket of talking heads (Talking Heads had a great song called Psycho Killer - complete non sequitur but feels oddly appropriate).

The bad guy’s plan was boring (corruption, drugs, something about a tape, yawn), I didn’t really care about June or Liam, partly because whatever happened to her, June would be fine. Hey look, a reference to Shawshank prison - as if you didn’t already know Joe’s dad is Uncle Stevie! And of course it’s set in Maine because the King family will never acknowledge the world outside of their depressing nook full of gurning weirdos.

But I loved the art. Leomacs’ (as if that’s a real name!) style looks exactly like David Lapham’s if he were coloured by Dave Stewart. I was thinking of Lapham because June’s also a dead ringer for Beth from Stray Bullets. Fantastic line work, great colours from Stewart as always. Also: Stray Bullets is highly recommended - read that series instead!

The premise is kinda amusing but my desire to find out what happened next waned real quick as I rapidly lost interest until I didn’t care no more. But you can’t trust a word I say because I also didn’t like Hill’s Locke & Key series over at IDW so I wouldn’t know a good comic if it came up to someone and did something somewhere. Basketful of boring horror, qu’est-ce que c’est, fa fa fafaaa fafafafafafaa fafa…