Yeah, that's a lot of names credited up there for this second volume in a trilogy that I started back in February and plan to finish now that I've knocked out the other 'Boneyard' books on my shelves. Dwight L. MacPherson is the writer and the only consistent name across the three volumes. Luis Czerniawski returns as artist from the first but is joined this time out by Pablo Fernandez. Andrea Messi, continues as colorist but alongside Federico Luchetti and Steven Legge. Simon Robins also returns as letterer but shares those duties with Legge. Clearly there was a changing of the guard partway through this project.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first book in the trilogy, which was imaginative and atmospheric, but it's very much a first third of a trilogy rather than an opening volume. Nothing is resolved and I have little idea where the story is actually going, one reason why I want to dive right back in to find out. I also particularly like the artwork by Czerniawski, his slightly caricaturised style appealing to me, and the colouring by Messi, which runs across the entire spectrum. I can't think of a single book in which so many colours were used, partly because MacPherson takes Edgar Allan Poe on quite the journey through thoroughly different environments: cerulean oceans, vivid green forests, earthy cities, fiery realms underground, you name it.

To sum up the first volume, this is that Edgar Allan Poe, the author and poet, but he's haunted by the ghost of his beloved wife, Virginia Clemm, to tuberculosis, and he's struggling with his sanity. He falls asleep on her grave and tumbles into a nightmare, rescued from the Nightmare King by a well-dressed rat called Irving, who takes him on a quest to the Maghi. Everything is "dream within a dream" and, keeping with that dreamlike logic, may be an endless; with one cliffhanger after another bundling Poe, Irving and a fiddler crab called Terence into still more. Terra Somnium is in great danger and maybe only they can save it.

The second volume is like the first but on steroids. The action is nightmarishly fast with locations transforming in the blink of an eye. The Nightmare King changes his castle to the House of Infinite Doors, where a nightmare waits behind each door except one, from which he orchestrates battle with the chained ghost of Virginia at his feet. And this book is all battle, between the Nightmare King and the Dream Child, who's Poe himself. Everyone finds themselves magically aligned to one side or the other, as if they'd all made decisions we never saw. We only watch one decision being made, that of the corpse queen Lenore, ruler of Polyandrium, who doesn't want to fight but does so for the Dream Child.

Otherwise, it's already set by the time we open the book. The Nightmare King readies his armies and the gods are all on his side, except for the Maghi. They're a smaller but still notable force, in service of the All-Father, clearly Odin from Norse mythology, from which many of the others were also drawn. Poe finds himself rescued from Fenrir on the Fields of Bliss, for instance, by Thor, who swoops down in his flying chariot drawn by goats. However, they also number the king of Atlantis and Artemis from Greek mythology, whom he sends to Queen Lenore.

There are two problems here and they both manifest partway through the book. The first is story, because this volume begins with the hallucinatory weirdness that was so powerful in the previous one, only to speed up so much that it becomes a superhero cartoon, which is not remotely what I'd expected or indeed wanted from this trilogy. That's mirrored by the other, which is the art. Clearly the early pages are the work of Czerniawski who had done such a stellar job on the first volume. It then shifts, presumably to Fernandez, whose art is rougher and more cartoony, getting even more so in the final quarter.

I have to hazard a guess here that whatever budget MacPherson started out with decreased with time so that Hocus Pocus Comics simply couldn't pay for the quality of work they started out with. If you've ever seen one of those famous images designed to highlight what artists are worth, the sort of thing with three pictures of a horse, or whatever, all drawn by the same artist but one in a minute, one in an hour and one in a day. It sprang to mind here, because the first book seemed as if it was full of the latter, art that Czerniawski could take his time over and render perfect. Here, his art starts out in the middle, more rushed and less polished but still worthy, while Fernandez's starts out similarly, rougher than his predecessor's art but the middle category for him, until the budget dropped low enough for him to just knock out whole pages in a day and let it be.

That's disappointing and I'm a little wary of opening the third volume. Hopefully MacPherson was able to raise more money to pay for the time his artists need to do their best work. Then again, it's fair to say that his writing decreases in quality in a similar way, so maybe it's not him in control. In many ways, the delightful originality of the first book turned into a sort of 'Matrix'-esque road of discovery, in which Poe realises that he's the dreamer and so has power, but perhaps the King of Nightmares is his imagination and so has power over him, turning this into a subconscious battle between creator and creation. I like the idea. I don't like how simplistic it became.

In fact, both story and art become so simple within the final quarter of this book that it feels like a paradigm shift. I swear blind that these pages were not originally the same size, that the earliest pages are large and fully fleshed out, but the last quarter of pages were much smaller, then blown up to match the size of this volume. It's like reading a regularly printed novel that suddenly shifts into large print without any warning whatsoever. It's jarring and not in a good way.

All in all, this is a serious step down from the first book, increasingly so as it goes. With one more to come, I hope it picks back up in quality. Then again, if it plays out any faster-paced than this, I'll be turning pages so quickly I'll be finished before I begin. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Dwight L. MacPherson click here
For more titles by Luis Czerniawski click here
For more titles by Andrea Messi click here
For more titles by Simon Robins click here