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Review: Gyo by Junji Ito

Cemetery Dance OnlineAugust 11, 2021August 10, 2021Graven Images, ReviewsDanica Davidson, Graven Images, Gyo, Junji Ito, ReviewsLeave a comment

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cover of gyo by junji ito Gyo by Junji Ito
Viz Media (October 2018)
400 pages; $22.99 hardcover, $15.99 ebook
Reviewed by Danica Davidson

Tadashi and Kaori are taking a vacation at Tadashi’s uncle’s beach house in Okinawa, but things quickly turn into a nightmare. Tadashi is peeved by how close some sharks get to him while he’s out scuba diving, yet when they return to the beach house, Kaori can’t stop complaining about an awful death smell. Tadashi tracks the stench to a very strange creature he finds in the house — a fish with mechanical, buglike legs. He kills it and puts it into a plastic bag, although it keeps moving and keeps trying to come after them.Continue Reading

Review: King of Eden by Takashi Nagasaki and Ignito

Cemetery Dance OnlineMay 19, 2021May 18, 2021Graven Images, ReviewsColumns, Danica Davidson, Graven Images, Ignito, King of Eden, Reviews, Takashi Nagasaki, Yen PressLeave a comment

cover of King of Eden volume 1, showing a man in a trenchcoat with his back to us

King of Eden by Takashi Nagasaki and Ignito
Yen Press (September 2020)
384 pages; $24 paperback
Reviewed by Danica Davidson

In Spain, some police officers find a mountain of grotesque bodies that no longer look quite human. One man, a Korean archeologist named Teze Yoo, is there to burn the bodies. He’s taken into police headquarters for questioning, where he tells police they must evacuate the area, because it’s a virus that attacked all those people, and then he starts talking about the world’s first murder. He asks the police if they’ve ever heard of the neuri, because all this began with them. Some sort of human-turned-beast attacks the police department and Teze walks off into the night.Continue Reading

Review: Remina by Junji Ito

Cemetery Dance OnlineDecember 15, 2020December 12, 2020Graven Images, ReviewsColumns, Danica Davidson, Graven Images, Junji Ito, Remina, ReviewsLeave a comment

cover of Remina by Junji Ito

Remina by Junji Ito
VIZ Media (December 15, 2020)
256 pages; $19.99 hardcover, $15.99 ebook
Reviewed by Danica Davidson

At first it looks as if everything is working out for 16-year-old Remina. Her father, a scientist, won the Nobel Prize for discovering a wormhole. When an unknown planet from a different dimension comes through the wormhole, it makes her father even more famous and celebrated, and he names the planet Remina after his daughter. Buoyed by this fame, Remina the girl uses it to get into the entertainment industry and became a celebrity in her own right.

But then the planet Remina keeps heading toward earth, moving faster than should be possible. Moving faster than the speed of light, even. As it goes, it destroys the planets on its path. It appears to have eyes that look out, and giant tongues that can attack planets. It doesn’t take people long to figure that the planet Remina will destroy earth as well.Continue Reading

Review: Mieruko-chan by Tomoki Izumi

Cemetery Dance OnlineDecember 14, 2020December 6, 2020Graven Images, ReviewsDanica Davidson, Graven Images, manga, Mieruko-chan, Reviews, Tomoki IzumiLeave a comment

copy of Mieruko-Chan volume 1

Mieruko-chan by Tomoki Izumi
Yen Press (November 17, 2020)
146 pages; $13 paperback, $6.99 e-book
Reviewed by Danica Davidson

Mieruko seems like an average high school girl, but she keeps seeing hideous monsters wherever she goes. She’ll be standing out in the rain waiting for the bus when she’s joined by a monster with socket-less eyes, a gaping gut, and faces staring out from its insides.

“Hey, can you see me?” it asks her. “You can see. Can you see?”Continue Reading

Review: Moriarty the Patriot, Vol. 1 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ryosuke Takeuchi, and Hikaru Miyoshi

Cemetery Dance OnlineOctober 26, 2020October 20, 2020Graven Images, ReviewsColumns, Graven Images, Hikaru Miyoshi, Moriarty the Patriot, Reviews, Ryosuke Takeuchi, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, VIZ MediaLeave a comment

Moriarty the Patriot, Vol. 1 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ryosuke Takeuchi, and Hikaru Miyoshi
VIZ Media (October 2020)
206 pages; $9.99 paperback; $6.99 e-book
Reviewed by Danica Davidson

William James Moriarty was barely in the Sherlock Holmes books, but his position as Holmes’s archenemy and “The Napoleon of Crime” have kept him in people’s imaginations. Over the years he’s been seen in movies, books and other forms of entertainment not made by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And now he’s the main character in a Japanese manga that’s been made into an anime currently playing in Japan and streaming in America.Continue Reading

Review: Something is Killing the Children Vol. 1 by James Tynion IV and Werther Dell’Edera

Cemetery Dance OnlineOctober 14, 2020October 12, 2020Graven Images, ReviewsBOOM! Studios, Columns, Graven Images, James Tynion IV, Joshua Gage, Reviews, Something is Killing the Children, Werther Dell'EderaLeave a comment

Something is Killing the Children Vol. 1 by James Tynion IV and Werther Dell’Edera
BOOM! Studios (May 2020)
128 pages, $13.41 paperback; $12.74 e-book
Reviewed by Joshua Gage

Something has been taking the children of Archer’s Peak. At first it was just one girl, and the police assumed it was a typical family kidnapping perpetrated by an uncle. But then, young James and his friends have a sleepover, and when it’s over, James is the only survivor. There are bodies and blood. The whole town is in chaos. Then, a stranger with an uncanny knowledge of things who talks to her stuffed-animal octopus arrives and says she’ll take care of things. Something is Killing the Children is a really strong series from writer James Tynion IV and artist Werther Dell’Edera.Continue Reading

Graven Images: The Nancy A. Collins Swamp Thing Omnibus

Cemetery Dance OnlineSeptember 25, 2020September 24, 2020Graven ImagesBlu Gilliand, Columns, Graven Images, Nancy A. Collins, Omnibus, Swamp ThingLeave a comment

In her introduction to this omnibus, Nancy A. Collins describes how comics of all kinds attracted her at an early age. Her interest in the medium kicked off right about the time the Comics Code was losing its once-considerable grip on the industry, which put her in a prime spot to catch the wave of horror comics that began flooding the newsstands. She talks about picking up copies of Eerie and House of Secrets as part of her weekly haul — but it was the cover of a comic featuring a certain muck-encrusted monstrosity squaring off with a werewolf (drawn by horror maestro Bernie Wrightson) that really stood out to the young fan.Continue Reading

Review: The Harrowing of Hell by Evan Dahm

Cemetery Dance OnlineSeptember 16, 2020September 15, 2020Graven Images, ReviewsEvan Dahm, Iron Circus Comics, Joshua Gage, Reviews, The Harrowing of HellLeave a comment

The Harrowing of Hell by Evan Dahm
Iron Circus Comics (August 2020)
128 pages, $15 hardcover
Reviewed by Joshua Gage

In Christian theology, The Harrowing of Hell is the story of Jesus Christ descending into Hell after his crucifixion and rising, triumphant, three days later on Easter. Evan Dahm has taken this story, as well as some details from apocryphal gospels, and created a very dark graphic novel that, while still religiously based, is sure to appeal to horror readers as well.Continue Reading

The Full Dark, No Stars Covers That Might Have Been

Cemetery Dance OnlineMay 17, 2011July 12, 2016Graven Images20 Comments

The Full Dark, No Stars Covers That Might Have Been
by Brian James Freeman

If you’ve read Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King, then you know this is a book with a really dark heart, which made deciding on a cover image and designing that cover a serious challenge. A lot of collectors never get to see “behind the scenes” of the creation of a Limited Edition book, so I thought it would be fun to discuss how the cover artwork and design for our most recent Stephen King book came to be.

First, we needed an artist. After much discussion, and once we rejected the idea of going with an AC/DC “Back in Black” style dust jacket, we hired Tomislav Tikulin to paint the cover. We had been impressed with his work on other projects and we felt he would bring a fresh perspective to this particular Limited Edition. We told him we thought we probably wanted a wrap-around cover (artwork on the front and back) with the back cover somehow “showing the inner darkness” of the character on the front, but that was all of the instructions we gave him so he wouldn’t be limited by our ideas.

Tomislav spent weeks on the painting, showing us each stage and discussing ideas and looking for feedback and suggestions to nail the tone, and he has very graciously allowed me to reprint those different drafts on this page so you can get a better feel for the process of how the artwork was painted.

(This post has been updated and moved to Brian’s blog. Please click here to read the rest!)

Samples Images From Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

Cemetery Dance OnlineOctober 19, 2010July 12, 2016Graven ImagesLeave a comment

Here are some sample images from Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King:

Sample images by Glenn Chadbourne from “1922”

1922 Sample

Sample images by Jill Bauman from “Big Driver”

Big Driver Sample

Sample images by Alan M. Clark from “Fair Extension”

Fair Extension Sample

Sample images by Vincent Chong from “A Good Marriage”

A Good Marriage Sample

Glenn Chadbourne Commissioned Artwork

Cemetery Dance OnlineJanuary 15, 2010July 12, 2016Graven ImagesLeave a comment

Last year, several customers placed custom artwork orders with us for the “Glenn Chadbourne Haunts Your House” and “Your Zombie Family Portraits” by Glenn Chadbourne promotions. Everyone was thrilled with the results and we wanted to show off just a few samples of what Glenn came up with. Some customers ask Glenn to mix and match the ideas, so there were a few Haunted Families and Zombie Houses, etc. All in all, everyone had a ton of fun with these promotional offers.

You can click on these images to load the larger scan in another window, but please note that these pieces were so large we had to scan them in sections and then piece those sections back together so we could show them off.

Samples of Steve Gilberts’ artwork for Butterfly by Simon Clark

Cemetery Dance OnlineOctober 25, 2009July 12, 2016Graven ImagesLeave a comment

Samples of Steve Gilberts’ artwork for Butterfly by Simon Clark

Butterfly

Click here to read more about Butterfly
by Simon Clark!

Samples of Glenn Chadbourne’s interior artwork for The Secretary of Dreams (Volume Two) by Stephen King

Cemetery Dance OnlineOctober 20, 2009July 12, 2016Graven Images8 Comments

This page features just a few samples of Glenn Chadbourne’s interior artwork for The Secretary of Dreams (Volume Two) by Stephen King. There will be HUNDREDS of illustrations in the final book, but we just wanted to give you a taste of what’s to come. More samples will be posted when the rest of the artwork is finished being scanned. Enjoy!