2 out of 5

The first Electric Black series was a mess of ideas. It succeeded because of that – because of the way it snicked and snacked through a million horror comic tropes, left-turning from one to the other – and leveraged its pileup of quirks into entertaining momentum, which all helped paper over some of its artistic and structural weaknesses.

One of those weaknesses was definitely character: it is a series about a concept and not about people; it’s about ‘The Electric Black,’ supernatural museum of deadly curios, and not really about the oddballs who work there. So while it makes sense for followup series “…Presents” to focus on those characters – two per issue, one written by Schmalke, one by Woodall, with various artists – it does so under the assumption that the characters are already interesting. …Which they are not at this point, as per the first series’ lackings. The scattershot-ideas approach does return, and as an addendum to the preceding books, some of the connections are appreciated, but it moreso just underlines that EB is all conceptual, and that the vague lore that’s been constructed is rather especially vague, and without much feeling of consequence.

The appearance of some other artists besides Schmalke and Woodall helps to shake things up a bit, but even with some known quantities in the mix (e.g. Karl Moline), there’s a sense of the scripts relying more on shock and twists than character or story depth; sometimes it just feels like we’re viewing one piece of dialogue stretched to a page with directions of “draw some evil things here.” This kind of surface-level approach is, natch, notable on the surface as well – it seems logical that the story of the Electric Black’s first owner and current proprietor might be good concluding entries, but instead we end on “Jack,” who felt consequential at best, and whose story doesn’t have a particularly stirring ending with which to conclude the mini-series.

As with the original issues, there’s definitely promise here – tons of ideas, and some good (if, as mentioned, occasionally thin) dialogue), and while the chosen artists for the book are maybe all slight mismatches in one way or another, we’re close to a grindhouse vibe that works. However, whereas the kitchen sink plotting approach sufficed to entertainingly distract before, trying to focus on the series’ characters unfortunately highlights some core elements the storytelling is missing.