Bone Parish: Volume One

/ Alex Good

Bone Parish: Volume One

Breaking Bad meets American Horror Story. I’m sure I’m not the first person to describe it that way, but it was so obvious I managed to come up with it by myself.

The premise is nifty. A family in New Orleans is producing and selling a drug called Ash that’s made out of the remains of dead people. The high that it gives allows the user to be possessed by the spirit of whoever’s corpse they’re snorting. Or sometimes they just inhabit the dead person’s reality on an one-way trip. It’s not clear. But in any event, these altered states are evoked quite effectively in swirls of psychedelic pinks and purple haze. They can lead to epiphanic visions or go very bad.

Despite the risks in using it, Ash turns into a very popular drug and the family is soon faced with organized crime elements looking to muscle in on some of the action. Fighting back, the drug becomes weaponized, which leads to a satisfyingly gruesome conclusion.

A good story then, and one that kept me interested all the way through. I especially liked the blurring of the line between the living and the dead, and the way the family members have personal demons that are lovers. On the negative side, I thought Cullenn Bunn was a little too fond of hooking text over from one page to the next, and Jonas Scharf’s faces looked too much like masks. In fact, there was one page where I was sure Leon was wearing a mask and it took me a long time to decide that he wasn’t. Also, the big ‘gator scene seemed out of scale, which was distracting for a full-page spread. But I still enjoyed it and was definitely interested in seeing where things were going next.

Graphicalex

17 thoughts on “Bone Parish: Volume One”

  3. I know AHS is a prime thingy, and being horror, I’ve stayed away from it. It is “real” horror or just gore and jumpscares though?

    As for this, I’m not sure I’d ever consider giving a horror graphic novel a chance. It would seem to combine the worst of a book with the worst of a screen adaptation, all rolled into one.

    And hurray for Classic WP4 statements 😀

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    • I thought the first season of AHS was excellent, though I don’t think you’d care for it. The other seasons were terrible, in my opinion. (Each season is a standalone story.)

      This is pretty good. But if horror isn’t your thing then I wouldn’t bother. In most ways it’s more a crime story than horror though. And I don’t think I’ve ever read a horror comic that was actually scary.

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