For each of man’s evils, there exists a special demon.
There’s a new chapter to the Pumpkinhead story! Written by Cullen Bunn (Venomized and Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe) and illustrated by Blacky Shepherd (Voltron – From the Ashes), the graphic novel collects five issues of the Pumpkinhead series, and tells the story of another grieving relative who asks the witch Haggis to call up the demon of vengeance. Just like the movie, the demon rises and cuts a swathe of destruction as it tracks down the marked target.
What’s different here is that the witch Haggis has sisters, and Haggis isn’t the only one with a monster to watch over…
If you’ve seen the original 1988 film Pumpkinhead (which I only watched for the first time last night. Oh hey there Bishop! What are you doing without a shirt on?) then all the beats from the main story will be familiar. Ne’er-do-well outsider carelessly kills a child (two children this time, killed in a hit-and-run car accident), child’s relative (grandfather in this case) decides to call on a witch for some supernatural revenge. Pumpkinhead comes to life, starts slaughtering everyone close to the intended victim, the human linked to Pumpkinhead has a lot of time to regret his choices, and various bystanders are caught in the crossfire.
What takes a little power out of the story is the fact that the intended victim and everyone around him are all awful people. The guy literally has a Virginia Battle Flag tattooed on his back, his cronies are all hillbilly mob/drug-dealer business associates of his high-powered lawyer/politician father (also a drug-dealer of some kind), and you literally have no reason to hope that any of them survive.
When Pumpkinhead starts taking them out (in a much gorier fashion than it did in the movie), the plot has to be livened up with the introduction of the long-lost sisters of the witch Haggis. That’s actually where the book begins, in a scene from the sisters’ childhood before the demon of vengeance had been given a mortal keeper. This is the part that I would have liked to see a lot more of; Blacky Shepherd’s art isn’t as effective in action scenes, but he does much better with expressions, or with the ghostly scene of the seven children searching the graveyard in the mountains. And it feels like there’s a wealth of story ideas here, all about the background of this strange family, and how they were trained to become the keeper of the different evils of mankind. What would keeping the evil of “Lust” or “Envy” entail, and how exactly would those be called on?
Unfortunately what we get is some unexplained family drama, and a battle royale of demons who might decide to destroy humanity if they’re not stopped. We’ve all seen the Hellraiser movies, people, this isn’t adding anything new.
The graphic novel includes the oddly interesting backup story “Gluttony” by Cullen Bunn and Kyle Strahm, and the main story has a reappearance of a character that at least made me go “oh hey, I know who that is!” Shepherd has the design of Pumpkinhead down cold, and he does creative things with the designs of the other demons (I think it may be Pride that’s the most unusual; there’s a lot going on there). The whole thing is worth a look, although I’m mostly hoping that it will lead to stories that take the whole mythology a lot further.
