“My friend’s dressed like a dinosaur, she looks like the kind you’ve never seen before; Daddy’s dressed up like an old mummy, the toilet paper costume was practically free”
Halloween Boy collects issues #1-5 of “the smash-hit indie series,” which makes me wonder how much you have to sell to be a “smash-hit indie series,” but I guess it’s doing well, as writer/artist Dave Baker notes in the backmatter that he’s working on issue #13, so I hope we get more nice hardcovers, because this is pretty keen. 
This sucker costs $29.99, comes to us from Oni, and has 238 packed pages.
Baker’s spiritual antecedents are people like Tom Scioli or Aaron Conley, in that his art is extremely busy, wonderfully detailed, a bit abstract, a bit cartoony, and wildly inventive. His main character, Halloween Boy, is a paramilitary, masked, vampire-like dude who zips around the galaxy helping people in need, and he remains a bit of a grounded presence in the midst of a lot of wildness. There are a lot of soldiers in this comic, and Baker does a nice job with their uniforms, distinguishing their ranks quite well. Baker creates some wild characters, like the android servants who are giant Elvis heads and small arms and legs, the priest whose head is just a large eye, and the creepy big spiders, some with wings. Halloween Boy uses strange weapons — a sword that emanates from a candle, for instance — and also some more mundane things, like machine guns, and it’s a nice incongruity in the book. 
Baker’s real genius is in the way he creates the landscapes, as Halloween Boy moves through wildly immaculate caves, ragged ghettos, dank forests, ruined temples, and his own base is a rock dominated by a giant skull and off which flows a magnificent waterfall (no need to worry about an actual source — it’s a comic!). He uses a loose, flowing line that brilliantly fills the page, and he also uses shading to create a lot of negative space, which makes this a wildly interesting-looking book, as there’s a lot of texture and depth without a ton of busy hatching (not that there aren’t a lot of lines, of course, but the figures, for instance, aren’t over-hatched). He has an excellent sense of perspective, so there’s some wonderful depth of field in the panels, and while the art is frenetic and busy, it’s never difficult to parse and it tells the story very well.
The story is nothing special, but Baker does good work with it. Halloween Boy roams the galaxy helping people, either those who are oppressed in some way or he just takes jobs to find things for others. Early on, we get a fun Indiana Jones pastiche, and Halloween Boy meets a girl named Carrion, who becomes his Girl Friday, to a degree. 
Eventually, the story becomes about his father and how he grew up without him, but when his father shows up, it’s certainly not what Halloween Boy expects. He always tries to eschew violence, but he’s certainly not adverse to it, and Baker does a good job making him a tortured soul. Nothing is too surprising, and while Halloween Boy is sad that he’s a bit of an orphan and wretched because his dad seemingly didn’t want him around, it’s a bit paint-by-numbers. I don’t hate it, though, because Baker has so much fun with the adventures Halloween Boy goes on and the end, when bad guys invade his home, is really well-paced and laid out. He does a good job with Carrion, who acts as our POV character. She gets her own arc, to a degree, which is nice because Carrion’s past tragedy doesn’t make her as brooding as Halloween Boy is. As weird as a lot of the book is and as “throw things against the wall and see what sticks” it can feel like, Baker does create this wacky and rich galaxy, and the oddball characters help make the story work a lot better. It might not be the most complex plot in the world, but Baker does a good job making it cool.
Halloween Boy volume 1 is a really good comic. It’s very fun to read, and it looks amazing. I do hope we continue to get nice collections, as Baker seems to have a lot of fun ideas about the world in which Halloween Boy lives. It’s packed with wild stuff, and it’s just very keen to read. So go read it!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
