Wraith - Welcome to Christmasland #1

Writer - Joe Hill

Art - CP Wilson III, Jay Fotos

We've had comic book tie-ins for movies.  We've had comic book tie-ins for television shows.  Today IDW gives us one of the first comic book tie-ins for a novel that I can remember.  

Joe Hill released "NOS4A2" this summer top solid reviews.  He'd been mentioning the great wealth of unreleased material he'd put together in relation to that novel fir sine tone as well.  In an effort to get some of that material into our hands, we get an early Christmas present in the form of a deeper origin of that story's main antagonist, Charles Talent Manx III.

Where this story really shines is when we ate treated to Hill's prose against the backdrop of Wilson's art.  Things feel a little more awkward when the comic book staples of speech bubbles come into play.  It seems Hill had to adapt his own work in order to make the conversations work on the page.  The differences between the two mediums are really apparent here.  

The story feels torn from the novel.  We get the same narrative feeling and the art backs those feelings up with a quiet, unsettling sensation throughout the build-up.  I'm really interested to see where things go from here and how fleshed out the characters from the novel become.  This will be interesting series and one to watch.

The Verdict...

I've been a card carrying member of the Joe Hill groupies since his releases of 20th Century Ghosts and IDW's Locke & Key.  The guy can write.  Comics, novels, whatever.  There were some hiccups here and there, but he's earned my faith.  I'm committed for the series.