The Fog

   This Dark Horse graphic novel was written as a prequel to the 2005 remake of the Fog. However, as this incorporation ideas and story structure that John Carpenter wanted to include in his classic 1980 version, this book can act as a prequel to that film as well. That actually works quite well for me as I've seen the original (which scared the hell outta me) but not the remake.

    The prequel starts in China with a group of Shanghai traders fleeing a mysterious fog. They arrive in a coastal town in post-Civil War California, where they work in the town's mines and perform odd jobs. When one of the residents begins a series of gruesome experiments on one of the boat people, they unwittingly unleash the ancient curse hidden in the fog that the immigrants so desperately fled China from.

    The Fog was very good, but it wasn't great. (Which is what many people say of the original film from 1980.) The writing was good, the art was fantastic, and there was a great scare factor in the book, but something was missing. The story needed a little more tweaking in terms of plotting and pacing. Some scenes, that in my opinion seem unnecessary, drag on for several pages. Whereas when the story gets to the climax, and we have a chance to truly grasp what was done to cause the fog to come to America and curse the coastal town, everything seems rushed and vital information is either forgotten or glossed over in order to meet the page requirement of the book. 

    If this was a miniseries instead of a single volume comprised of 88 pages (really about 80 if you remove the forward and afterword) then I think more time could have been given to flesh out this story better. Like Carpenter's original film, this book was fraught with missing opportunities...

    I found this book at Ollie's for dirt cheap. If you don't find it there, Amazon has it few literal pennies on the dollar. This was a fun book and I probably should have waited for closer to Halloween to read this. But the awesome Mike Mignola (Hellboy) cover and dynamic palette by Dave Stewart (also of Hellboy fame) was too tempting for me to wait.

   Worth Consuming

   Rating: 8 out of 10 stars