“The poor, misguided, directionless familiar of some obscure Scottish poet”
Technically, this is volume 1 of We Don’t Kill Spiders, but Joseph Schmalke, who writes and draws this, is working on other stuff, too, so who knows. DC Hopkins letters this and Shawn French edits it. 
It’s published by Midnight Factory, it costs $19.99, and it’s 90 pages.
As I have often noted, I dig me some detective stories set in weird places, and Schmalke gives us a Viking who is hired by the chieftain of a town to figure out who’s been killing the villagers in gruesome fashion. The chief suspects Revna, a young witch whose mother was executed by the villagers some years earlier. Bjorn, our hero, is, of course, level-headed and clever, so he doesn’t go straight to suspecting the witch, and of course he’s right, as Revna is not the killer, although she does have a connection to the killer. There’s a lot of supernatural stuff going on, and the warriors in the village aren’t quite what they seem, and Schmalke has a lot of fun with it. It becomes less of a detective story and more of a “man trying to do the right thing who’s way out of his depth,” which can also be enjoyable, as Bjorn is clearly out of his element. We get a nice flashback to when he lost his faith in the gods, and Schmalke does some nice work with the irony of that as he confronts some stuff that might prove that the gods are, in fact, all too real. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the problem is that I can’t really write too much about it without spoiling it. It’s a nifty story, and while Schmalke doesn’t do too much twisting and turning things the plot too much, he does a nice job revealing things and getting us through it all. By the end of the story, Bjorn is still alive, and he can move on to the next adventure. Will Schmalke get back to the story at any time? 
We shall see!
Schmalke’s art fits the tone of the story nicely, as he uses rough lines and lots of hatching to make the comic look dark and miserable — it’s winter in the north, so it’s always a bit twilight-y, and Schmalke does a nice job making the outdoors look rough and the indoors look a little bit more welcoming, although it’s not great, of course. His figure work is a bit stiff, but that doesn’t matter too much, because there’s not a ton of action in the book. He does some fun things with perspective, especially when the occasional spider shows up. His supernatural stuff is quite cool, too, as he designs some very weird shit that would freak anyone out. His coloring is good, as the supernatural stuff has a bizarre hue that feels out of step with the natural world and makes those scenes stand out very well. A lot of the coloring feels like “natural light,” whether it’s outside or inside, so the weird supernatural stuff stands in nice contrast to that.
This isn’t a great comic, but it’s fun. It’s a cool little supernatural mystery that has a bit of the xenophobia that always seems to come up in horror things — the villages must punish the outsiders! — and Schmalke does a decent job with it. I hope there will be more. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
