2 out of 5

‘Colder’ has a creepy looking bad guy on the cover.  THE END

‘Colder’ is about a guy whose body temperature drops after he absorbs evil from people.  THE END

To summarize: I don’t have much to say about ‘Colder.’

I’ve been lazily following Paul Tobin around after… I dunno, Bandette, I guess.  But his other books I’ve popped my head into – which aren’t all-ages-ish, it could be noted – haven’t been all that great.  The cover for the first ‘Colder’ series was always really eye-catchingly gross, and it kept getting hyped along with other Dark Horse ‘horror’ books like B.P.R.D., so I figured this second series would be a good place to catch a ride.  Let me establish that I don’t find comic books all that horrific or frightening, often.  I love horror anthologies like ‘Creepy,’ but those aren’t so much for the scares as they are for the same kind of dark entertainment we get from movie / film counterparts like ‘Tales from the Crypt.’  Hellboy and B.P.R.D. definitely aren’t horror, they just have monsters.  You do have books like ‘Crossed,’ (in Garth Ennis’ hands…) which come closest to a fright for the way they’ll plunge into psychological depths.  (Admittedly, also, slathered in gore.)  None of these formats irk me because they don’t seem to be aiming for something they’re not.  But ‘Colder’ might be.  I think ‘Colder’ is supposed to be a horror book, but it’s about a guy with freaking super powers and a girlfriend.  He’s happy.  The horror appears – from this issue – to be coming from some bogeyman who will cause problems in the near future.  So take out the bogeyman and things can go back to being happy, there’s your conclusion.  I’m sure I’m missing out on some gut-wrenching buildup in the first series, but I don’t fully believe that: the tone Tobin effects here is too comfortable to have been generated out of the blue.

Also, if you’d like for me to lose interest in your book / movie right away, perform overkill of the following: carrying dialogue over between two characters when time has clearly passed between each sentence (or word, sometimes) but it’s presented to us as though it’s all one conversation.  In comics: I start my sentence in scene A, time passes, the setting changes, and I finish my sentence in scene B, and we pretend like no context was lost.  To the reader there wasn’t, but to the people involved… there probably would be.  So I’m completely taken out of the tale.  This can be a technique, but it can also be a lazy way to piece scenes together, and it’s the entire first page of Colder.

Juan Ferreyra draws a nifty monster and the pacing is well done, moving us through a day in the life of our Colder guy and introducing the baddie in a bloody fashion.  But it’s not scary, and I’m not interested.