The Calling: Cthulhu Chronicles [2011]

by Michael Alan Nelson and Christopher Posseni [covers by Sean Phillips]

Boom! Studios

112 pages

From the solicitation:

"A cruise ship comes to port - hundreds aboard are dead, but why? Clayton Diggs is a pharmaceuticals salesman who discovers his sister, plagued by a mysterious fear and terrified, has committed herself to an insane asylum.

All across the world, moves are being made, hands are dealt, and momentum is shifting, while ordinary people in an ordinary world find themselves drawn by fate to see darkness and despair unlike anything they could ever imagine..."

From the creator of "28 Days Later" comes another Lovecraftian tale whose premise piques the interest of fans of the Great Old Ones and of horror mysteries.

The story begins with a short scene depicting a violent kidnapping, but continues in a benign way with a pharmaceutical salesman closing a deal with a major hospital for a new drug, Briten, which is an antidepressant [ an SSRI like Zoloft] with fewer side effects than the leading drugs.

Clayton then visits his sister at an insane asylum and finds that she's been mistreated, and he comes to believe it was her boyfriend who did it. He visits the guy and finds out a secret about his family that has horrible implications for his sister and for himself.

Simultaneously, a woman appears at a cruise ship that has returned to port with no passengers: all dead from an ultra-rare type of stroke. As she talks with the physicians to delve into what may have caused the deaths [including that of her husband, who was a passenger aboard the Paradise], she discovers that there were actually five more bodies found than the manifest indicated should be onboard the ship.

Most of the extra passengers were children.

The story continues and reveals a major plot by a large corporation and a wealthy businessman, cults, and cosmic threats from otherworldly dimensions. It's all grand, but like the new Star Wars prequels and subsequent films, it doesn't feel that way; it feels like everything happens in a box.

Perhaps it's because a story on this grand scale deserved a much longer medium, perhaps two or three volumes, as opposed to one.

Additionally, several elements are introduced that can lead to really cool subplots, but they just aren't explored much, if at all. And then there's the ending: it is so anticlimactic, it's reminiscent of Indiana Jones coming face to face with a martial arts master who performs a minute-long display of moves, and Jones just pulls a gun and renders him dead with a single shot.

This is all a real disappointment, because the "Ghost Ship" angle is great, and the artwork is so good that this could have really turned into a classic story that many would talk about for years to come, but it fails so terribly that even those good elements can't fully save it.

With moody, dark, and beautifully rendered art, this could have been one of the best Cthulhu Mythos stories ever, but it's all wasted on a rushed, incomplete mess that leaves the reader not wanting, but rather disappointed - and it ends as one of the worst.

If you're looking for cool monsters and strange goings-on, look elsewhere, because you won't find it here. Instead, you'll find promises of such things, and a reality of promises unfulfilled. I regrettably give this a 2 out of 5.

This trade paperback can be found at comic shops, on Boom-Studios.com, Amazon.com, eBay, and on Comixology.com.