Flesh Crawlers (1993) #1-3 by Richard Rainey and Michael Dubisch

I’m guessing this was a book already in the works at Tundra before Kitchen Sink took over, but I guess it could have originated at KSP? They also did a number of sci-fi comics, but it just seems ineffably like a Tundra book.

It starts off pretty well — the artwork is really weird, but that can work well with this sort of thing.

But… it’s just mainly a lot of weird grimaces that leave you wondering whether they mean anything, or that the artist just isn’t, well, very good at drawing faces. Most of the characters look very similar, and everybody changes quite a lot from panel to panel, so keeping track of who’s who is a strain. You have to resort to guessing by looking at hairdos — but even that is difficult since they, too, look different from panel to panel.

I think the artist’s main interest lies with drawing monster and grisly deaths.

Storywise, this thing worked pretty well the first issue: Nothing was over-explained, but it was obvious that we were in a Body Snatcher sitch with aliens etc. Very standard plot, so no exposition seemed necessary… but then they start explaining everything in tedious detail, and any momentum the book had evaporates.

Swell monsters. And people that seem to stare into infinity instead of at anything in the panels.

The series is OK, I guess? It’s mildly entertaining, and the artwork is so wonky that it’s interesting.

Looks like Dubisch is still working on monster comics, which makes sense.

It looks like this series has never been reprinted, and I’m unable to find any reviews of the series.

This is the one hundred and forty-sixth post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.