Broken Frontier

When you open that door, you never know if you will be stepping into the House of Mystery...

Cain has lost his home and now it searches for the people that read it. The first drink is on the house, but then you will be drawn into its stories. It’s time to meet a wonderful cast of characters in the Dreaming. Boy, is it good to go back home.

Vertigo returns to its most celebrated set of characters as the spin off from The Sandman gets a new lease on life. If you read the "On the Ledge" this month, Sturges and Willingham claim that Berger has threatened them with death to do this book, but from the craft that is on display in this first issue, it was probably the other way around.

With little set up of the premise and the characters, Willingham and Sturges take you into the House and show you around. This is the kind of mystic realism book that made Vertigo the premiere publisher of the weird in the 90's. This book appears to be some kind of nightmarish version of the Twilight Zone.

Sturges is the lead writer on this book. His main story seems to be about vagabonds who cross paths in a bar within the house that has somehow been misplaced by Cain. Willingham is going to use the bar setup as a frame to tell a short in each issue. So it is kind of a two in one book, where we will get an anthology of shorts and a larger more complex connecting story of the Fables or Shadowpact ilk. Who better to do this than this duo of writers?

The book promises to showcase great art as well and this first issue does just that. The art in the main story by Luca Rossi seems to call The Sandman as an influence, but it is not like that is hard to do, considering the range of artists who graced the pages of that seminal work. However, the colors of Loughride and the ambience provided by Rossi’s pencils give it the feel along with a vague similarity to any arc of the Lord of Sleep’s epic.

The art by Campbell in the short is the stunning bit. He somehow juxtaposes the story book cleanness of a young Sally with a creepy world of anthropomorphic flies. It is stunning and unnerving at the same, just as Willingham’s script.

This is the kind of book that will have readers guessing for sometime to come. I hope it can live up to the legacy of the writer’s pedigree and the Gaiman origins of the book it is revitalizing. So far, so good.