Monster Massacre

For monster-loving aficionados, this anthology is a promising start to a new series from Titan Comics. The venture must not have been successful, however, because there are only two volumes, this being the first. One problem might be that the stories, some feeling very much like those out of an issue of Heavy Metal Magazine, are not good stories beyond the art. If you try to sell a story on sex appeal and monsters alone, which some of these stories do, including that featured on the cover, you aren't going to draw a loyal following. If I want art of sexy women, I can subscribe to Heavy Metal Magazine after all. But what this anthology delivers on is monsters, and there are some great ones in the book! If you want to see dinosaurs, for example, you will love the gallery by Steve White (I especially like his underwater texturing). I don't mind the paintings of scantily-clad females appearing in the book, but the publishers are appealing to a traditional older teen male audience with them, which doesn't draw in a larger readership, nor will it hold the interest of an eclectic, older audience for long either with the cheesy, cliché-ridden, B-movie dialogue featured in most of the included stories, such as a woman about to fire a scoped rifle saying "Make my day." Perhaps the hamming it up is what is implied by "Massacre" in the anthology series' title, but I'm hoping for something more along the lines of there being so many monsters, that you know that it's just gonna be a massacre!