Review: Monster Massacre / Author: Various / Artist: Various / Publisher: Titan / Release Date: Out Now

With its large format and thick glossy covers, Monster Massacre feels like a British comic book annual, albeit one for grown-ups, and that’s exactly what it is: an anthology crammed with multiple stories from different artists and writers, as well as some text-only short stories. The only thing missing is a puzzle page and a pull-out pin-up.

Monster Massacre is very much aimed at adults; not only is every story some flavour or other of horror, the pages that aren’t filled with monsters are filled with drawings of woman in a various states of undress. The artwork throughout is very, very nice, and features work from the likes of D’Israeli, Alex Horley and Tom Raney. The collection begins with an old-school Jack Kirby reprint, and gets better from that point on.

The stories are short and scary, and the full range of spooky is explored here: from clever little fairy tales, to daft superhero stories with semi-naked succubi, the book does its best to wow the reader. Though there are no poor stories in the set, the collection is very wide and it veers from haunting darkness to gory silliness in a single turn of the page. This makes for a slightly bumpy read, but this isn’t the sort of thing you read in one sitting anyway (though you could do so quite easily); it’s more something to dive into when you have a spare moment. Monster Massacre is an excellent showcase and will appeal to those of us who wish that the horror comics far outnumbered the spandex crowd.