4 out of 5

Boom!’s horror anthology has managed the impossible – surely thanks to Bryce Carlson’s curation: firstly, as an anthology book, it has more than outlasted its initial superstar contributor features (starting with entries from both Garth Ennis and James Tynion IV), and it has never been an Eerie / Creepy / Twilight Zone knockoff: Darkness can do the last minute zingers, or the creature features, but it arrives with an actual willingness to be unnerving, and without a tension-reducing punchline.

Issue #19 is perhaps themed around self-deception; everything here is affectingin various ways… except the ongoing features. This is something that, like, only 2000 AD and Dark Horse Presents have ever really done well: mixing one-shots with multi-part stories in an anthology. I recognize that those multi-parts are kind of how you seal the deal on bringing people back, but A. they’re often not going to fit squarely in an issue’s theme if one exists, and B. most writers who didn’t grow up in this format just… aren’t great at the 3-6 page story thing. Sam Humphries witches-on-a-baseball team tale, Cassie, suffers from B – there’s not much to latch on to in this story slice – and unfortunately he’s paired with a rather polarizing artist, Eleonora Carlini, who’s stylized, anime-adjacent sketchiness could work in a one-shot, but is hard to sink into with a story not designed to be new-reader-interesting on its lonesome.

The other feature, Robert Hack’s Sunday Comics-style horror-humor cartoons, are funny, but they are also more fitting in either an Eerie or Creepy or an issue with a more directly, blackly humorous bent.

Criticisms made, the remaining three stories are dark, in the bestest ways. Tate Brombal’s Imposter Syndrome uses Piotr Kowalski’s formalist style to do a pretty brave (and bleak) take on the push and pull of everyday life and its “little” offenses, even when things are going well. Paulina Ganucheau writes and arts a creative takedown of the rich that, like Tate’s story, is willing to expose its reader’s throat to our self-denial – the “I’d never want to live like that” / “I wish I could live like that” conundrum of wanting what you don’t have. Lastly, Fell Hound’s zombie takeover narrative Gunmetal Ghost does a POV spin on living through an apocalypse that, like the best of such tales, really makes the feelings involved hit home – a not easy task for such a now-common premise.

In general, Hello Darkness manages this noteworthy balance of challenging, great stories to, in my opinion, more “standard” entries, but I appreciate that the latter are part of the game in attracting a readership.