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Full disclosure: I’ve been friends with Matt Maxwell, writer of Strangeways: Murder Moon, for a few years now. I’ve been privvy to his publishing woes (he’s like Spinal Tap, and they’re all his drummers), and less privvy to the work itself, save for glimpses at art here and there. But I suppose I gave him enough moral support to warrant a mention in the Thank You’s.

Having said that, I’ve tried to approach Strangeways as I would any other comic. Puffing up a review for his book doesn’t help him become a better writer, it doesn’t help you make a good buying decision, and it doesn’t help me maintain some integrity.

You don’t see a lot of Westerns in comics anymore, and you see even fewer werewolf stories. Westerns in comics (save Jonah Hex) have largely been relegated to the artier publishing houses, just as it seems the only Westerns that show up on the silver screen anymore are arthouse productions. Werewolves get even less play, I guess because they’re not sexy like vampires and unlike zombies they’re not a threat to civilization on a macro scale.

Which is a shame, because the two elements dovetail so nicely, something Maxwell knows well. Westerns are about the frontier in more ways than one; the untamed land leaves people to their own devices, and without the safety net of top-down law and order you get a sense of what people are really all about when put to the test. Shift a few words around and you have a perfectly acceptable definition of horror. Werewolves, with their uncompromising brutality, are something like nature itself, stalking through small towns full of settlers presumptuous enough to call the land theirs. Red in tooth and claw, right?

Which is pretty much how Murder Moon goes. A werewolf stalks a frontier town, and into that mix comes Civil War veteran Seth Collins, come to find his estranged sister. The hellishness starts for Collins even before he gets to town: the carriage he’s riding shotgun on gets hit by the werewolf, and he and his friend Web are the only survivors. Web may have… caught something… from the werewolf, and soon the murder of a townswoman is blamed on him. The sheriff is unsympathetic to Collins’ reasoning. Most sheriffs in Westerns are either all bad or all good, but this one is refreshingly contradictory.

The werewolf provides the suspense and the occasional piece of restrained gore, but it really comes down to the weariness of Collins, the condemned Web, and that sheriff… something even the werewolf only manages to occasionally shock them out of. They operate on subtextual levels that are often admirable (Collins’ issues with his sister are beautifully understated) but sometimes confusing. There’s a whole subplot involving a rotten deputy and stolen silver that I could not, for the life of me, make heads or tails of. Its occasional reappearance only served to remind me that the subplot existed at all.

That subtextual murkiness fits well with the art from newcomer Luis Guaragña. Guaragña’s work is in harsh blacks and whites, sometimes reminiscent of some of the better pages of Sin City but many times simply murky. I found myself pleased and annoyed by the abstractness in equal measure; the werewolf was objectively scary, but sometimes, dammit, I just wanted to see someone’s face clearly.

Which may be Strangeways: Murder Moon in summary: often quite good, often frustrating, occasionally resonant. Maxwell’s work is a cut above your typical first-timers, but then I know for a fact he’s spent a lot of time working on this one. Maxwell understands well that horror doesn’t have to be in your face, that often what sticks with you longest are the scenes and moments that give the reader enough credit to put the pieces together. Strangeways is not great horror, but it is good, if flawed horror. Perhaps next time Maxwell will hit all the beats.

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