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A review by marthmuffins
Pumpkinhead by Cullen Bunn
1.0
Pumpkinhead - 1.5/5
A few interesting disparate elements such as bringing in the demons for the other deadly sins and a bit on Americas militia movement don't save this for me at all. Those elements never really come together, with the other sins only really being here so Pumpkinhead can have some badly staged and drawn Kaiju fights with them rather than doing anything to explore their own mythology, and the militia stuff is only here to give the interchangeable hillbilly clans some firepower to use against the demons.
Bunn's writing does this series no favours but it's the art for me that really drags it down to 1 star. Everything looks just really ugly, and not in a fun kind of gross horror movie way but in a just badly drawn way. It also has the issue that the world itself feels empty: everyone's home is so clean and has no clutter or anything to tell you anything about the people or the place we're seeing. Contrasting this with the carefully considered clutter of both Ed Harley’s house, the little hamlet, and Haggis’ shack in the movie and it feels all off from that original film. It's an issue I've seen with a lot of modern art in comics, probably down to the extreme crunch and the workload required of many workhorse comic artists to make money, but sometimes characters here just exist in a void with no discernible features at all.
Never mind the art for the demons themselves. Pumpkinhead looks awful, just a big grey blob of nothing, and the new demons have passably interesting designs that having nothing done with them. Each of them just wrestles with Pumpkinhead for a bit and that's it, there's not really any unique aspect to them that is used narratively (beyond perhaps Gluttony vomiting and Lust being vaguely sexual towards Pumpkinhead). It's a big waste of the concept and not engaging at all.
The plot itself is essentially a rehash of the first film but this time the victims of Pumpkinhead fight back with more demons. It’s not well developed and what interesting ideas there are (the militias, getting the police involved etc) are just not used very well, and no one is developed enough to care. Now, the victims in the movie weren’t well developed either but Ed Harley was a very well rounded character for the creature feature he was in, and there’s no one near that in this comic series.
The backup story gets a half star just for trying to develop an interesting narrative around the witches, Haggis, and the other demons, but it's too short to really land and whilst the art is better it's still not great.
Overall, a really weak entry from Bunn and another weak Pumpkinhead story. You'd think backwoods vengeance demon would be pretty easy concept to write a franchise around but here we are, with only one good movie to the Pumpkinhead name and little else to recommend. The only other piece of Pumpkinhead media I could call good is the 1993 Dark Horse miniseries, and that remains unfinished after it was cancelled two issues into it's 4 issue run.
A few interesting disparate elements such as bringing in the demons for the other deadly sins and a bit on Americas militia movement don't save this for me at all. Those elements never really come together, with the other sins only really being here so Pumpkinhead can have some badly staged and drawn Kaiju fights with them rather than doing anything to explore their own mythology, and the militia stuff is only here to give the interchangeable hillbilly clans some firepower to use against the demons.
Bunn's writing does this series no favours but it's the art for me that really drags it down to 1 star. Everything looks just really ugly, and not in a fun kind of gross horror movie way but in a just badly drawn way. It also has the issue that the world itself feels empty: everyone's home is so clean and has no clutter or anything to tell you anything about the people or the place we're seeing. Contrasting this with the carefully considered clutter of both Ed Harley’s house, the little hamlet, and Haggis’ shack in the movie and it feels all off from that original film. It's an issue I've seen with a lot of modern art in comics, probably down to the extreme crunch and the workload required of many workhorse comic artists to make money, but sometimes characters here just exist in a void with no discernible features at all.
Never mind the art for the demons themselves. Pumpkinhead looks awful, just a big grey blob of nothing, and the new demons have passably interesting designs that having nothing done with them. Each of them just wrestles with Pumpkinhead for a bit and that's it, there's not really any unique aspect to them that is used narratively (beyond perhaps Gluttony vomiting and Lust being vaguely sexual towards Pumpkinhead). It's a big waste of the concept and not engaging at all.
The plot itself is essentially a rehash of the first film but this time the victims of Pumpkinhead fight back with more demons. It’s not well developed and what interesting ideas there are (the militias, getting the police involved etc) are just not used very well, and no one is developed enough to care. Now, the victims in the movie weren’t well developed either but Ed Harley was a very well rounded character for the creature feature he was in, and there’s no one near that in this comic series.
The backup story gets a half star just for trying to develop an interesting narrative around the witches, Haggis, and the other demons, but it's too short to really land and whilst the art is better it's still not great.
Overall, a really weak entry from Bunn and another weak Pumpkinhead story. You'd think backwoods vengeance demon would be pretty easy concept to write a franchise around but here we are, with only one good movie to the Pumpkinhead name and little else to recommend. The only other piece of Pumpkinhead media I could call good is the 1993 Dark Horse miniseries, and that remains unfinished after it was cancelled two issues into it's 4 issue run.