2 out of 5

Collecting the Pix-C experiences of a couple of Roger McKenzie updates / creations, the Total Frenzy compilation comic suffers the fate of being a bumpy reading ride without the cheeky framing of the Charlton Arrow in which one of these characters – Spook – also appeared.

The Spookman half of the book is definitely the lesser of the two, with inconsistent pacing and clunky art preventing the thing from coming together.  Sandy Carruthers’ rough, loose linework was a good fit for a slice of ghosty exploitation in the back of an anthology, but combined with an ongoing narrative that requires a lot of scene hops, skips and jumps, it’s not a great match: character personalities are inconsistent and the settings have no sense of space.  The story – which trawls through some Spook appearances (including back with the detective from The Arrow) before settling on the beginnings of a mythology.  …Which is a great idea, formed from disconnected ones, but only gets a couple of pages of room here.  And whether it’s the format (webcomics), writer McKenzie’s scripts, or Carruthers’ interpretation of those scripts, tracking the story – which is more a list of cliches at this point – is more of a task than it should be.

The second half of the book is much better on all fronts, but gets bogged down in peaky plotting as well.  Setting romance comics’ nurses into a zombie plague is inspired, and McKenzie sits back and lets his pulp sensibilities’ take charge for a few pages, with some pretty dynamic, zombie-splitting work from artist Dærick Gröss, Sr.  There’s an ante up in the middle of things with the inclusion of a new character that’s pretty hilariously over the top amusing, but then we pedal back into attempted drama and the inspiration sorta deflates.

Either one of these strips works pretty great as an isolated few pages in a mix of stories, but strung together, their inherent weaknesses in construction make them less compelling reads.