Beginning with a story of fraught friendships before unfolding into a The Hangover-style paranormal mystery, the latest issue of Grimm Tales of Terror Quarterly Presents tells the story of a bachelorette party gone wrong. The interesting demonic antagonist and a compelling mystery plot make for an entertaining story, but the inconsistent artwork brings the party to a close in a whimper rather than a bang.
Grimm Tales of Terror Quarterly Presents: Bachelorette Party
Vicente Cifuentes and Rodrigo Xavier (Artists), Jenna Lyn Wright (Writer), Igor Vitorino and Ivan Nunes (Cover Artists), Taylor Esposito (Letters), and Maxflan Araujo (Colors)
Zenescope
November 10, 2021
Bride-to-be Megan assembles her eclectic group of bridesmaids for one last fling in Las Vegas before her wedding to fiancé Troy. The lineup includes her best friend Gina, older sister Hayley, hippie Wiccan friend Kayla, Troy’s ex Jess, and Dani, who’s busy texting a secret boyfriend. Every friend in the cast has a distinctive voice and personal conflicts to give the story a more complete arc, both in the supernatural mystery plot and the relationships between Megan and her friends.
After a slow start in establishing the characters’ respective suspicions and insecurities, the bachelorette party begins with matching tattoos for the bridal party before moving to a nightclub for drinking and dancing. Haley, Gina, and Kayla awaken hungover the following day to find Megan and the rest of their friends missing. The remaining bridal party retraces their steps from the night before as the dire implications of their friends’ disappearances become clear.
From the tattoo studio to the nightclub and finally a palm reader, the friends follow clues to uncover a grisly trail of bodies in the wake of their party. They soon learn the entire group has been tattooed with a symbol used to summon a demon that feeds solely from the lifeforce of wedding parties. As the demon stalks the remaining friends, the search leads to an abandoned chapel in the desert where they must rescue Megan or die trying.
The plot is low on substance but overall delivers an entertaining, self-contained horror story. Writer Jenna Lyn Wright grounds the sparse supernatural mystery in the friendships between Megan and her friends. The 72-page length doesn’t allow for deep characterization, and some of the plot threads are left hanging by the conclusion, but Wright gives a good sense of the women and their backstories. Some red herrings along the way, such as two men attempting to drug the friends at the nightclub, pad out the mystery a bit and give it some genuine tension as the search unfolds. Choosing to use women instead of men in this Hangover-esque set-up also heightens the tension due to the characters’ realistic fears of assault throughout the book. It’s a small touch, but it helps keep the story rooted in real anxieties as the somewhat sillier supernatural elements kick in.
While I enjoyed the overall script, I wish the same could be said of the visual narrative, which leaves a lot to be desired. Artists Vicente Cifuentes and Rodrigo Xavier provide pencils in the usual house style for Zenescope horror comics: repeated use of the same references to the point that the characters look identical, and yet also have inconsistent hair or clothes from one panel to the next. If not for the characters’ different skin tones, I wouldn’t have been able to keep track of who’s who. Overall, the lack of consistency and detail leaves the artwork feeling disjointed and hard to follow.
However, colorist Maxflan Araujo adds a great deal of depth throughout with the liberal use of shadows, textures, and lighting effects. At his most successful, such as during the nightclub sequences and the final showdown at the chapel, the soft pops of light accentuate his lovely pastel palette choices. At his least successful, the use of lighting effects feels aimless, trying to create a sense of environment without details or shadows to ground it. It’s unfortunate because I like Araujo’s work a great deal on this and other Zenescope titles. Had he been given a little more material to work with, he could do far more than just layer in splatter textures in bafflingly bloodless horror scenes or try to create backgrounds out of nothing through sunburst effects.
Where there’s time spent on detailing the characters and their surroundings, the dynamism and emotional weight create real stakes. The artwork truly shines in the final sequence in the chapel as the remaining friends square off with the demon stalking them, facing an ominous horned creature with tentacles that crack like whips to attack. While the girls rarely receive the same care, the snarling, thorny beast is certainly a striking creature in its concept and design, bathed in shadows that swallow every panel it occupies. Visual touches like that make the book satisfying to read, although the artists aren’t credited by the page so I can’t even attribute the artwork to the correct contributor.
Overall, Grimm Tales of Terror Quarterly Presents: Bachelorette Party is an entertaining horror story with some soft spots that can make it difficult to get into. The plot provides a good time, and the colorwork does its best with what’s on the page. But the disjointed, inconsistent pencils make the book hard to follow, lacking the necessary details for an effective horror narrative.
