Puppet Master: Halloween 1989 #1 Review and *SPOILERS*

Bodega Bay Boogie Man

Written By: Shawn Gabborin
Art By: Daniel J. Logan, Dan Olvera
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: October 12, 2016
Publisher: Action Labs: Danger Zone

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

With Halloween approaching I figured I'd mix things up a bit and get a little spicy and try to expand my horror horizons by doing something other than just sitting around and watching horror flicks like I do every year.......... and by expand my horizons I mean, I'm simply reading horror comics instead.  Now, I've gone on and on about how much I love the Puppet Master series and even though I've fallen behind in the normal comic series, when Action Labs put out a special Halloween issue to the series, I just had to read it because........... Well, because it fits all the criteria to the things I love.  Comics, Puppet Master and Halloween, it's all there and who doesn't love a nice one-shot every now and then?  Let's jump into this Halloween issue that takes us all the way back to 1989 and see a story that takes place between the first and second films in the franchise.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Like you'd expect from something entitled Halloween 1989, this issue takes place...... Halloween 1989 at the Bodega Bay Inn, where our puppet villains/heroes have been residing for the majority of their film series, but on this night they're in for something that they've never experienced before....... A honest to goodness monster.  Yeah, as we start this issue off we see a creature emerge from a cave off the cliff side that the hotel rests on and this monster makes his way up to the hotel and it's up to our puppets to stop him before possibly hurting their current master, Megan Gallagher.  

The thing about this issue that is weird as hell is that it's a mostly silent issue.  It's just the monster coming into the hotel, growling his way through the rooms and halls and eventually growling his way through a fight with our tiny terrors.  Even though the monster is a interesting new addition to this series, it's the puppets with their silent gestures that really make this book come to life and how we see them create tactics to stand in the way of this creature attacking their new master in her sleep.  Even the panels of Jester standing as the last line of defense in case his friends fall was a really nice touch, but even with subtle additions like that, which I love to see, it doesn't really add to the excitement of the issue because there really isn't much going on.

In the end, our puppets join together for a group attack to bring this Halloween monster down and after he's down, we see that he's simply a boy in a costume and through flashback sequences we see that a group of friends and him had been throwing a little party in the cave below, before coming up with the idea of going up to the hotel and scaring Megan Gallagher.......... Yeah, not the best idea, especially since the group eventually make their way up to the hotel to see what happened to their friend and find him lying dead and since the puppets can't be leaving witnesses behind..... Well, you get the idea.  The following morning, Megan Gallagher awakes in a cheery mood and sees her friends/protectors downstairs, where we see they've been cleaning up their mess all night and as our issue closes, we also see the bodies of the teens strewn about the cave below.  

That's it for this Halloween issue of Puppet Master and even though I love these characters and a handful of scenes in this comic, I can't say that it was all that good.  It's a fast read, especially since there's very little dialog to this book and while I'd like to say that the art more than made up for it, I can't really say that either because with our monster character actually being a kid, who growled and carried on because of what I simply assumed was a crushed larynx........... I had to assume this from what we were given and actually figured this from the get go because of how similar it was to the reveal in Halloween Resurrection, where Jamie Lee Curtis actually killed an EMT because Michael Myers had crushed his larynx and put his mask on the medical worker as a way to slip away.  Now, I'm a huge horror fan so this seemed really similar to me, but for everyday readers they may not come to the same conclusions that I did, but overall there just wasn't a lot to this issue to really get excited about and from what we got I can't say that this is an issue that's really worth picking up.

Bits and Pieces:

Even though I'm a sucker for anything with Puppet Master and Halloween on the cover of something, I can't say that I really enjoyed this issue because there really wasn't much to it.  Barely any dialog and while that's an aspect to the conclusion of this story, it just made for a boring read and the art wasn't to the point where I could say that simply looking at this book is worth the cover price alone.  All in all, this is a forgettable issue that doesn't do much to be fun or add to the mythology of these characters.

4/10