Dark Horse are billing The Scream as a superhero comic, but it doesn't read like one.

The basic premise is, at this stage, a little obscure.  Danny Duncan has just got out of an institution, where it seems he may have wrought havoc without entirely being aware of it.  Drifting through life in a mediocre job, Danny seems to have some weird power to project his daydreams onto other people.  As for the Scream, it's apparently a monster that shows up when he's in a suitable aggressive mood.

Frankly, the details of the concept are rather unclear at this point.  But that's fine, because Peter David is evidently going for a degree of mystery.  Danny clearly doesn't know what's going on, and while the villains know a little more, they're not quite sure either.

There's a subplot about Danny's father, a senile war veteran who swings back and forth between lucid affection and delusional rants about what a disappointment Danny has turned out to be.  Obviously, that begs the question of whether he's simply trying to be polite when he's in control of himself, which is a rather touching set-up.

Art comes from Bart Sears, who's never been one of my favourite artists.  He has a tendency towards wild exaggeration in a way that doesn't quite work for superhero comics.  His superheroes tend to be ludicrously overmuscled and contorted.  But he fits rather better with this series, in which he gets to caricature real life, and the occasional fantasy elements are genuine figments of the imagination in which he can truly go nuts.  There's something very odd going on with the age of the lead character, who seems far too young to have a senile father, but it's so obvious that I'm prepared to assume for the moment that it's deliberate.

Still, this is an oddity, and it's a little too early to say whether this is going to work as a long-form series.  If indeed that's what The Scream is.  It's not labelled as a miniseries, but frankly, pinning down any information about this series has been remarkably difficult.

Considering that it's by Peter David and Bart Sears, who are fairly well-known names, this book has been remarkably underpromoted.  Somewhere along the line, the issue seems to have been seriously delayed - the closing editorial is headed "September 2007."  I wondered, then, whether it was pushed properly a few months back and then slipped my mind.

But, no. Googling has turned up some press releases from Dark Horse, mostly reproduced on obscure blogs, and that's about it.  Nobody seems to have done any interviews for it - certainly none that I can find.  And as near as I can make out, Peter David hasn't even mentioned the book on his own website.

I have trouble believing that it's that hard to get coverage for a series like this, especially if the creators are willing to do interviews in support of it.  No book sells without people knowing it's there.  This series seems to be consigned to obscurity from the word go.  And that's a shame, actually, because it's not bad at all.  It's something a little different.  Still, it won't find readers by being so shy.

Rating: B+

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