Dead Mall is a poetic, ghoulish, suspense-laden nod toward the past and the present – and promises to give us one heck of a chilling horror story. Genuinely great writing make this one a solid read, but one senses this issue is just a building block intended for a much more sprawling tale.
Dead Mall #1
Justin Birch (Letters); Adam Cesare (Writer); David Stoll (Art and Cover)
Dark Horse Comics
October 26, 2022
All around the country, malls are dying. Oh, some of them have managed to survive the onslaughts of the COVID-19 pandemic, online shopping, and the economic downturn, but others are being repurposed into fresh spaces, bulldozed and reapportioned into smaller stores. It’s a bittersweet prospect, especially if you’re a child of the ‘80s. Dead Mall is poised to take that nostalgia, coat it in blood, and leave you with a bad case of buyer’s remorse.
A group of young urban explorers breaks into the soon-to-be-demolished Penn Hills Galleria with the hope of getting some Instagram-ready pictures. But they’re being stalked by an evil that wants to make mincemeat of them. These ghouls have already killed the previous occupants who have tried to spend time in the mall’s crumbling shell – the poor, the greedy, the desperate, the weak, the lonely. They have their reasons and excuses, of course – they do call out the selfishness and evil of the teens who use the place for their desires without respecting what has passed before them. But it’s clear that the mall has a sinister lust for the souls of the living. Using the ghosts of the store’s past and the kids’ insecurities against them, they try to trap them. But there appears to be a savior hidden among the many wicked ghouls trying to kill them off.
The characters at the heart of Dead Mall are just starting to develop – there’s enough information to make them sympathetic and allow you to draw a bead on them, but we’ve only started to dig into their insecurities. There’s party-hearty Emmett; puckish Rose; the anxious Beth; confident Soph, and Max the athletic lock picker. Of all of them, I ended up enjoying Beth the most because she’s got the most to deal with. She seems to have a form of claustrophobic agoraphobia, which makes her reluctant to enter the mall at all, let alone battle the monsters within. The long-term friendship between herself and Soph is great; Soph’s protectiveness is lovely, as is the loyalty Beth shows Soph in return.
And those monsters are incredibly visually interesting thanks to the work of Stoll, who has thrown a skosh of Todd McFarlane into his playfully creepy wraiths, with their inky black trails of effluvia and their rotting, ghostly visages. Those creatures are creepy, but also visually interesting and even playful in their evil. His malls are big, blue-shaded, empty, and decrepit spaces. But they can also be beautifully sunlit and filled with happy memories. The balance here is great, and the character designs are a lot of fun and filled with variety. And the mystery that lies at the heart of the story – what are these creatures, and why do they require the blood of humans to maintain their life force – is intriguing enough to keep readers coming back to the second issue.
Dead Mall has hit the ground running. If it continues to play upon the inherent creepiness – and bittersweetness – of the world of dying malls, then it will have some (maybe eight?) legs.
