Quiet, Boy! You Wanna Get Sued? Lot 13 #1 Review

If you have any questions about the kind of story you’re about to read when you open up the first issue of Lot 13, written by Steve Niles and drawn by Glenn Fabry (in a rare turn on interior art), you’ll get an inkling once you see the first panel after the prologue, which features a helicopter shot of a vehicle being used by a family in the process of moving. And you’ll damn well know what kind of story it is when you see that family enter a mysterious, empty hotel. Cue ominous synth music. Press the button to summon the blood elevator. All work and no play make Jack yell here’s Johnny! Slow zoom to an old-timey television showing oh God that’s Steve Niles walking with Nicholson through the hedge maze – smash cut to black. Fin.

So yes: this comic book is – shall we say an homage – to Kubrick’s The Shining. If it wore its influences any more obviously on its sleeve, it would come packed in a “REDRUM” polybag. But that isn’t inherently a bad thing; after all, The Shining itself is an homage to The Haunting of Hill House and that turned out okay except for Danny Lloyd’s career. What matters in any haunted house story – and to be fair, it’s too early to tell if the hotel will be the primary setting, or if things will move sometime in the next four issues – is whether or not you care about the characters and their predicament. After all, what made The Shining so effective was watching Jack struggle against the power of the hotel, while if, say, Justin Bieber walked into the Overlook Hotel, I’d roll a Molotov Cocktail in after him, bar the door and pop some corn.

So that’s the overriding question: does Niles do a good enough job making characters that inspire enough emotion to do the heavy lifting to make readers forget that they’re a pair of twins and a phantom bartender away from conversing with their finger? Well, kinda… in the sense that while I found I really didn’t give much of a fuck one way or the other about four of the characters, at least one of them engaged me enough to make me want to kill them with an axe.

Lot 13 opens in 1670 Virginia, where we meet an entire community in the process of putting a family of dead people on trial, possibly because they are bored having not yet invented cable, or having tired of playing Pass The Syphillis. The dead family is found guilty and sentenced to, well, being dead, but the town buries them really, really angrily. Your criminal justice system at work, 1670’s Virginia! Anyhoo, we then cut to the present and meet an unnamed family – we’ll call them the Averages, or the Anyfamilys – preparing to move to their new house. But as they pack, strange things start happening: weird pictures start showing up on their cell phones, disappearing creepy kids wander about, and the family’s goth teen daughter moons sloppily over some guy and no one thinks to threaten to smack some dignity into her. They arrive at their new house only to find it tented to kill vermin, meaning that the Median Family hired the shittiest home inspector in the world, so they find a strange hotel and check in, only to have things start to go wrong…

Okay, we’ve established the obvious parallels to The Shining: you drop a normal family into a creepy hotel and have the young son meet a ghost child, and you might as well go to Shelly Duvall’s house and make her do takes until she suffers a prepsychotic episode. So let’s focus on what works best, which is the characterization of the family, or at least the parents. If you’re gonna do a haunted house story, you need victims that you can relate to, and Niles gives them to us, almost aggressively so. Ron and… well shit, I guess Ron and Wife; I’ve read this book three times, and I’ve seen her called, “Mom,” “Honey” and even “Madam,” but for the life of me I can’t find where anyone uses her real name. Anyway, Ron and Matronly Vagina Support Unit are presented as loving, involved, good-humored parents who clearly love each other and their children. They are a stereotypical white suburban family, including three kids, of whom at least one gets some reasonable characterization. Of course, that characterization is of a lovesick, histrionic, shrieky teenaged girl, who served only to remind me that many existing child protective laws are redundant, since talking to a teenaged girl is a terrible punishment in and of itself.

But the point is that this family is normal. Completely normal. Which is probably a conscious choice on Niles’s part to quickly ramp up the sympathy for the characters, but I found the effect to instead make me feel less for the characters. After all, by drawing them in big, broad, normal strokes, they could be anybody – again, the wife doesn’t even seem to have a fucking name – and therefore I found it hard to really care what happens to them, at least as far as the first issue goes. Things might improve on the characterization front at some point in upcoming issues, but for now, it’s just generic white people in trouble… and frankly, they are already making generic white people in trouble moves to put themselves into trouble. I don’t know about you, but if my cell phone showed me a picture of my family as corpses while flashing the word “DIE” written in blood even after it was turned off, I wouldn’t blame my fucking cell service provider… but then again, I don’t use AT&T.

I’ve always liked Glenn Fabry as a cover artist – his stuff on the Garth Ennis Hellblazer issues during the 90s is simply classic – but I’m really not partial to his work on interior comic art. The last time I remember seeing him do comic pages was on Kevin Smith’s aborted Daredevil / Bullseye miniseries, and this series had the same problem as this: what makes Fabry a damn good cover artist is his photo reference work that gives the work a unique, iconic look, but that same style makes interior sequences look static and flat. A lot of the panels in the book look completely static and non-fluid, less like action art and more like photos captured from Derp.com – seriously, some of these panels look like someone said, “Make an awful face… got it!” If you’re a Fabry fan, there are plenty of panels here that you could pull out and make a good cover with, but I just don’t find it works on interiors.

While I enjoy a good horror story, and there may well be one here as the subsequent issues start dropping, this first issue is kind of a misfire. The parallels to The Shining are obvious, and they write a check that would be difficult for any writer to cash. Further, while we might find that the Generic Family is sympathetic enough to root for, for now they just feel like broadly-drawn audience surrogates that it’s hard to care one way or the other about. The idea of a family put on trial for, well, being dead coming back for revenge is kinda interesting, but it doesn’t overcome the Banal Clan and they derivative-seeming plot. There’s just enough here for me to check out another issue to see if it ramps up… but that is one hell of a back foot for a series to start on. Particularly when my Shining DVD is just ten feet away.