Back in the early days, DC's Vertigo imprint produced an awful lot of vaguely goth, adult-oriented fantasy comics, building on the vast success of Neil Gaiman's Sandman.  The imprint has broadened its range considerably over the years, but still revisits its roots from time to time.

And so, here we have House of Mystery.  Notionally, this is a revival of the series that ran from 1951 to 1983 - an anthology title with the titular House as a framing device.  But as the opening scene acknowledges, the real selling point of the House of Mystery is its connection to Sandman, where Neil Gaiman incorporated it into the Dreaming.

On paper, this sounds like it ought to tick all the boxes for a successful Vertigo series.  It's got the Sandman connection; it's got fantasy; it's got stylish covers; and it's written by Matthew Sturges and Bill Willingham, who are producing some of Vertigo's most successful current work in that vein, with Jack of Fables.  And it's got an entirely nominal connection to an old DC book.

As it turns out, the result is an odd, hybrid book.  I'm not altogether sure where this series can go, but there's something oddly intriguing about the first issue.

The basic idea is that the House of Mystery has gone missing from the Dreaming, and has somehow been turned into a tavern - at first glance, not a million miles from the Sandman "World's End" arc, but I'll let that slide.  The inhabitants of the House hang around telling stories to one another and waiting their turn to leave, which seems to be determined by factors outside their control.  So while the main body of the issue is all about the people in the House and their story, it also doubles as a framing sequence for the stories they tell.  Apparently we're getting one of those per issue, keeping the book in touch with its anthology-title roots.

I'm not quite sure what you do, in the long term, with a series about a bunch of people sitting around in a tavern and not being allowed to leave.  But that's a problem to be confronted in future issues, and for now, the book is off to a strong start.  The main story is spiky, and makes the assorted weirdness work.  There's an air of gentle black comedy which undercuts some of the more gratuitous moments of horror, to enjoyable effect.  In tone, at least, this is a book that could do well with the Sandman audience - although it perhaps runs the risk of being so close in tone as to invite an inevitably challenging comparison.

The sub-story, Bill Willingham and Ross Campbell's "The Hollows", is an utterly creepy piece of surrealism about a woman who somehow manages to marry a giant fly without noticing anything unusual.  It's utterly repellent, but in precisely the ways that it ought to be - and there's a beautiful use of the page turn to tease readers about just how graphic the art is going to be.

My only nagging doubt is that this is an ongoing series, and I'm not sure where you go with it.  But as a first issue, it's excellent work.  I'm willing to give the creators the benefit of the doubt and assume that they know where they're heading with this.

Rating: A

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