Broken Frontier

This no-frills chill-fest proves Ernie Colón can still spot the blacks with the best of them. But can he write?

Inner Sanctum began life as a radio show right around the time America entered World War Two. Long before Rod Serling reached into living rooms around the continent via his creepy Twilight Zone, host Raymond Johnson crept into unsuspecting homes, heralded by the drawn out squeal of a squeaky door thanks to the magic of radio. Running from 1941 to 1952, Inner Sanctum was one of the most popular horror radio shows of its day and influenced a horde of genre storytellers in the intervening years.

Comic book legend Ernie Colón, perhaps one of the most diverse artists in the field in his time, having worked on everything from Conan to Richie Rich, takes a stab at translating the atmospheric radio masterpiece into his native medium, in a pretty little collection of stories published by NBM. Renowned for his intuitive ability to spot the blacks and the use of contrast to help build atmosphere, Colón would seem supremely suited to this adaptation – and artistically speaking he is.

Notorious for its use of cliffhanger endings and last-second plot twists, Inner Sanctum helped pave the path for such TV classics as the aforementioned Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. Most of the stories contained in Colón’s comic book adaptation are derived directly from the cream of the original show’s 582 episodes and adhere to the house formula. Colón doesn’t deviate very far from the core premise, expertly achieving suspense and a disturbing visual tone through his masterful inking, no easy task considering there were no previous visual templates to use as reference, as with more common film/TV to comic translations.

Perhaps it was this focus on setting the visual tone that accounts for the almost unbearably simplistic writing. For even as he awes his audience with stunning pages that showcase his brilliant visual storytelling, Colón falls short in the areas of plot and dialogue. To be polite, this is one legendary comic book artist who could have benefitted from a writing partner.

A feast for the eyes yet grating to the ear, Ernie Colón’s Inner Sanctum showcases his peerless talents as an artist but does nothing for his reputation as a writer. If you can get past the pedantic scripting then Colón’s art alone is worth the price of admission. Otherwise, take a pass on this not so spine-tingling journey into the shadows of another era.