Expecting a trainwreck, I picked up the first five or six issues of the Kirkman/Macfarlane “Haunt” as it was first coming out. I didn’t see a crash. I just saw two slow moving trains that seemed destined to run into each other. So I stopped reading the comic.

What made me pick up the latest issue is the horrible cover. Rarely has a cover of a mainstream book made me phlegm as loudly as I phlegmed when I pulled this out of the Diamond box. Usually when I think a cover is bad, it’s because I don’t like the artist, or there’s an odd perspective, or characters I’ve become familiar with don’t look right to me. This cover is just…ewww. Yes, Nathan Fox can clearly draw. But with no frame of reference for this story, this cover did not give me hope that this book would be anything but terrible. (Also, what the hell is wrong with the woman on the cover’s spine? Will we find out over the course of the book? I asked these questions before cracking open the comic, positively fraught with concern.

The book deserves a better cover.

Nathan Fox’s interiors are pretty top of the line Imagey pencils and colors. On par with, but not quite like, “Chew”. And Joe Casey’s story has me considering tracking down his other issues.

If you haven’t picked up any issues but have been interested, you need no nothing of the series to follow this. It reads like the first issue of an odd action series. It also reads like an annual, in that I’m intrigued to see where the story goes, but the issue has a definitive enough ending that I don’t feel the need to read the next issue. But I feel the want to read the next issue.

It feels odd reviewing an issue without really saying what the book is about, so, here it is: Some dead people can’t let go and get tied to the living. Certain people, such as the protagonist, can see these haunts, and it’s their job to send them off to whatever the afterlife holds. Now, that sounds like a really basic, and shitty concept. But, like any trite seeming concept, in the hands of the right creative team, it can ascend into greatness. I’m not sure yet if I would describe this run of Haunt as great, but it’s certainly very good.

I suppose I should thank Fox for making a cover deliberately ugly enough that it drew me into reading this.