The Milkman Murders is the latest entry in Dark Horse's horror line.  That said, they seem to be defining horror rather widely.

It's a four-issue miniseries by Joe Casey and Steve Parkhouse, and the theme is that old favourite - suburbia gone wrong.  Barb is a beleaguered housewife.  Her abusive husband is miserable with his life and takes it out on her.  You can certainly understand the bit about him being miserable, considering that he's got a teenage son who murders cats for a hobby, and a daughter who gets bounced from school to school for sleeping with the staff.

Barb, meanwhile, watches old TV shows with the classic nuclear family, yearns to have one herself, and feels desperately depressed about her failure to achieve it.

And that's a horror comic, I hear you ask?  Well... yeah.  That's pretty much what I was wondering.  It reads more like exaggerated satire on that old perennial subject: "The nuclear family is a creation of the media, and we make ourselves miserable by trying to aspire to it."  Or maybe Casey's in more conservative mood and just thinks that our failure to achieve the Natural State of Being is horrific enough in itself.  Given that it's Casey, though, I'd tend to assume the former.

Oh, and there's a very worrying-looking milkman who turns up at the end of the issue.  He's kind of horrific, I guess.  But really, nothing here registers as horror at all, at least in the sense that I understand the term.  Evidently Dark Horse take an expansive definition of the genre, but on the strength of the first issue, "satire" seems much nearer the mark.

There isn't much here in the way of new ideas, but Casey does the routine well enough.  Steve Parkhouse's art makes the book, though - exaggerated into the realm of cartoon, but still with a solid look to it, it strikes the right tone for this sort of story.  The milkman design is wonderfully unhygienic, as well.

Judged as dark comedy, it's a decent if somewhat unoriginal effort.  If you're expecting horror, on the other hand, you'll probably be disappointed - simply because this doesn't even seem to be aspiring to horror as the genre is usually understood.  Perhaps future issues will make that clearer.  After all, thus far, there isn't much murdering either.

Rating: B+

back | continue