Sometimes horror can be cute and still creepy. Sometimes it will just stick with you, and you’ll wake up in the middle of the night running a particular horrific scene in your head over and over. Having that kind of power seems deceptively easy in the medium of comics, but it takes a master to create a story that looks benign but sticks. Sticks hard.
That’s what writer and illustrator Adam Ellis accomplishes with Bad Dreams in the Night. His publisher, Andrews McMeel, gives him those honorifics because apparently cartoonist is too reductive for them. But for comics fans, there can be no higher praise than to say Ellis is a great cartoonist. Though his style hails more from webcomics than Milton Caniff, make no mistake: this guy has the chops.
Good artists borrow; great artists steal. At least, that’s what Picasso allegedly said. And Ellis takes inspiration from writers like Saki and O. Henry for a few of his short stories. He riffs off of the story of the woman with the ribbon around her neck. Even if you’ve never actually read the original story, you’ve heard it. But Ellis gives it a spin to make it wholly his own.
Some of his stories wade through the supernatural, made both reassuring by his simple but assured style and then suddenly your skin crawls. Or unravels, as in his story “Hangnail.” In a couple of instances, the unreal acts in an almost benign manner, but still unsettling. Overall, reading Bad Dreams in the Night had the same impact on me as reading Junji Ito. As Ito has become a major favorite of mine, I’ve got no higher praise.
If you find Ellis online, know that he doesn’t always traffic in horror. He’s often funny, with no twist. But this collection proves that being a little twisted only works in his favor… and ours.
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