“Up on the hilltop where the vultures perch, that’s where I’m gonna build my church”
As I noted recently, John Carpenter and Sandy King (husband and wife) run Storm King Comics, and I’ve bought some of them — most, from what I’ve seen, don’t have the greatest art on them. 
However, recently, they seem to have gotten some better artists, so I’ve been picking them up, and Cathedral is the latest one. Carpenter, along with King (who also edits this) and Sean Sobczak, are listed as writers, with art by Federico De Luca and Luis Guaragna, coloring by De Luca and Sian Mandrake, and lettering by Marshall Dillon. It’s $22.99, and it’s 110 pages long.
Cathedral is the kind of book that vexes me, because, on the one hand, it’s a pretty creepy horror comic, which is always good to see. On the other hand, the characters in it are so stupid that, while they fit into the long tradition of stupid characters in horror fiction, that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Why are they so stupid?!?!? The set-up is this: there’s an old, abandoned cathedral in Los Angeles, outside of which the police find a body one night that appears to have been turned inside out. Christine, a lieutenant on the force, realizes that it’s her dad (he was a beat cop) and when they watch his body-cam footage, it appears that he encountered a monster. She and two other cops, Paul and Steve, simply walk into the cathedral to investigate, and when it turns out there are a lot more layers to the church than they expected and they have to keep going down, they just … do. I mean, there’s some weird stuff on the first level, yet they just keep going down. Eventually, of course, they can’t go back up, so they have to keep going through the weird labyrinthine layers below, but it’s not like it wasn’t weird at the beginning, yet they think they can just keep going without any more back-up than they already have. Plus, I’m a bit sick of relatives of dead people investigating their murders. 
I’m almost 100% positive any police force in the country wouldn’t allow that, but Christine just jumps right in, and her lack of perspective ends up getting people killed (yes, not all the cops come out alive — it’s shocking!). The journey they go on isn’t terrible, as they uncover deeper and deeper mysteries about what killed Christine’s dad and the religions that shaped that particular spot and why it might be a bad idea to keep going (even though, as I noted, at a certain point they have to), and the ending is kind of evilly ironic, like some of the best horror fiction (it does come a bit out of nowhere, unfortunately, but it’s not a bad way to end it), but the way the writers get their characters into the position they’re in is just dumb. “Wait, my father was turned inside-fucking-out by something that looks like a monster? Let me go in there with only two dudes and handguns, woooooooo!!!!” Come on, characters!
The art chores are split between De Luca and Guaranga well, although I would have liked De Luca to do the entire thing. Guaranga comes on board when the characters reach the deepest level, and his art is a bit more stolid and less wacky than De Luca’s, which is a shame. He gets to draw some weird creatures and some gore, but it’s a bit too perfunctory for me. His line work is solid if a bit stiff, his monsters are fairly creepy, but his main villain looks a bit too much like a Marvel C-lister, whereas in the few panels that De Luca gets to draw him, he actually looks like a disturbing monster from the depths of hell. There’s nothing really wrong with Guaranga’s art, but its tone is more in line with a superhero book than a horror comic (even though he gets to draw gory things). De Luca, on the other hand, does a marvelous job creating a very weird space — he uses interesting angles to disorient the readers as much as the characters are disoriented, and he does nice work shaking up the layouts, moving panels to interesting spots and forcing our eyes to wander over the entire page instead of being regimented with our reading order. 
He mixes uncolored parts of the art with the colored parts, creating an interesting contrast, and he uses panel borders and negative space in unusual ways, further upsetting the natural order of things. He doesn’t get to draw many monsters, but the people his cops meet along the way are well done, wrinkled and desiccated from their long years underground, and when he does get to draw the big monster at the end of the book (not, sadly, Grover), he makes him a much more ancient and gnarled evil than Guaranga does. He hatches in an interesting way — he tends to draw short lines in clumps, but perpendicular to other line clumps, so we get some unusual texture to the clothing of the characters and the bricks and other stones used to build the cathedral. It’s very cool-looking art, and I wish De Luca had been able to draw the entire comic. There’s nothing terribly wrong with Guaranga’s art, it’s just not as good.
Cathedral is enjoyable, certainly, and it has some good things going on it, but it does fall a bit short of a truly great horror comic. It feels like the writers left a little too much meat on the bone — the exploration of religion and its weirder aspects is never a bad thing to explore, but most writers don’t quite pull it off, and this is another example of that. Plus, the stupidity of the characters really does get to me. But it’s not bad, and De Luca’s art is very good. I can’t give it more of a recommendation than that!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
