Severed (HC)

It’s 1916, twelve-year old Jack Garron has left the only home he’s ever known to search for his biological father who abandoned him as a baby. With a fiddle in his hand and adventure in his heart, he hits the open road. On the way he befriends Sam, a cocky drifter and the pair set out to locate Jack’s father. The open road is scary enough for two young adolescents, but it’s about to get a whole lot scarier. There’s a cannibalistic madman on the loose with razor-sharp teeth & a taste for human flesh and he’s about to make the lives of our two young drifters a living hell!

Now this is the stuff that nightmares are made of! Being a kid on your own is frightening enough without facing the unknown, putting your trust in a stranger only to experience the ultimate betrayal. I love horror stories, whether they’re books, movies, tv or even comic books. The best stories are the ones that don’t show or explain too much in the beginning. The tension builds & builds until the very end when the alien has the heroine cornered or an axe-wielding drooling psycho is chasing a little boy through a snow-covered hedge maze or a man is floating helplessly in the ocean with a blood-thirsty great white shark in his sights or in this case, a young man is chained up in a decrepit house with a cannibalistic maniac who’s about to have him for dinner.

Normally, horror stories don’t scare me much, but if done right, can freak me the hell out. This is exactly the case with this mini-series, collected here for the first time in a beautiful hard cover edition. Written by Scott Snyder, who knows a thing or two about killers who have spilled their share of blood (see American Vampire Vol. 1-3). Co-written by long time friend Scott Tuft & illustrated by Attila Futaki who perfectly captures the mood, style & scenery of America in 1916. Together, they have given us a horror story that goes for the jugular (no pun intended) and doesn’t hold back.

You could save a few bucks and wait for the soft cover edition or like me, you could treat yourself and go for the HC, I promise you won’t be disappointed. I also love how Image made this hard cover edition with the book’s jacket actually glued into the card board. Unlike Marvel, who has those annoying jackets you have to remove every single time you read them. Also, the cover title and the action of the killer ripping through the cover have this glossy effect that simply shines. It’s actually taken from the original cover of Severed #3, but it looks fantastic. Originally published as Severed #1-#7. From Image Comics.