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A review by crookedtreehouse
MANIAC OF NEW YORK by Elliott Kalan, Mike Marts
3.0
I've been watching the classic slasher films this week, Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Friday The 13th, Nightmare On Elm Street, and Child's Play, so I was excited to read a graphic novel that traded on the same tropes. This volume started to deliver on that premise but really flamed out by the end.
The idea of a slasher who comes and goes as they please in New York is a Friday The Thirteenth concept that failed to deliver (Jason Takes Manhattan). It picks up really well here with a New Year's massacre followed by several smaller scale attacks in the following years. We see two detectives with very different tragic pasts coming together to try and track the killer down, and we even get a Ghostbustersy mayor that wants the problem to go away but actively hinders the detectives from getting their work done.
There were some definite highlights to this story: the entire train scene, the aforementioned mayor angle, the grandparents of one of the survivors being a Fox News viewer completely incapable of connecting to her granddaughter who is an actual survivor of the tragedy and who knows the detective that Fox News is trying to paint as evil, and the interaction between the two detectives. These help balance the detectives' tropey backgrounds, the villain's weakness that we see but no one has yet taken advantage of, and the non-ending that is neither a cliffhanger nor a resolution.
If you like slasher films or stories, I think you'll enjoy everything about this but the end. But there's at least one more volume coming, so let's hope it has a more definitive, or at least more intriguing finish than this one did.
The idea of a slasher who comes and goes as they please in New York is a Friday The Thirteenth concept that failed to deliver (Jason Takes Manhattan). It picks up really well here with a New Year's massacre followed by several smaller scale attacks in the following years. We see two detectives with very different tragic pasts coming together to try and track the killer down, and we even get a Ghostbustersy mayor that wants the problem to go away but actively hinders the detectives from getting their work done.
There were some definite highlights to this story: the entire train scene, the aforementioned mayor angle, the grandparents of one of the survivors being a Fox News viewer completely incapable of connecting to her granddaughter who is an actual survivor of the tragedy and who knows the detective that Fox News is trying to paint as evil, and the interaction between the two detectives. These help balance the detectives' tropey backgrounds, the villain's weakness that we see but no one has yet taken advantage of, and the non-ending that is neither a cliffhanger nor a resolution.
If you like slasher films or stories, I think you'll enjoy everything about this but the end. But there's at least one more volume coming, so let's hope it has a more definitive, or at least more intriguing finish than this one did.