4 out of 5

Mike Baron: Writer of ten billion ideas, and nowhere near the page space – comic or text – to make fully realized.  The Architect, published through indie Big Head Press as a prestige-sized OGN, comes close, though, by hinting at a larger sense of mythology that actually makes the book surprisingly spooky.

The back cover copy would have you think of this as a ‘tale of love, lust, genius, and betrayal,’ but to me, this is straight up horror: a creaky, ancient god-worshipping, cracked architect disappears while working on his opus – Bluff House – and years later, Gil Hopper inherits the house.  Immediately, his fiance and friends move in to help reconstruct the place, and just as immediately the weird discoveries start – odd runes, music drifting from nowhere, and hand-shaped mushrooms growing in the basement.  Which we should eat, obviously!

While the escalation of things from there won’t be surprising, Baron casually breathes life into the history of the elder architect, the house, and the new inhabitants.  The dotted details he offers on the cult are just enough to give things an edge of unknowing, and artist Andie Tong – regrettably given to some cheesecake upskirt type angles – arts up and paces the gore very effectively.  Before the inevitable turning point when things go nuts – with a great splash page to match – Baron and Tong wrangle an effectively creepy story out of some normal haunted house tropes.  There’s even enough lore between the panels for Mike to have included an additional text story about a whole separate cast affected by similar events…

The Architect’s story itself is admittedly average, and its very sudden conclusion (and accompanying one-liner) underlining that another couple of issues or so to make this into a mini could’ve been nice, but the tense mood and sense of history beyond what we’re shown makes the short read undeniably entertaining, and worth flipping through a few times.