False Halloween

"Why'd you have to go and make things so complicated
I see the way you're acting like you're somebody else
Gets me frustrated"

Avril Lavigne - Complicated


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Spoilers:
The Last Halloween
and
False Positive
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I don't hold much with the horror genre. For one thing I'm on the analytical side, so at most points where the audience gleefully engages its subcortical fight-or-flight-or-popcorn response, I'd be wrinkling my nose thinking: "Waaait a minute... that doesn't look like the correct tensile strength for a small intestine at all..." On the other hand, while I can boast a relatively strong stomach for anatomy, violence and the intersection thereof, I can still be jump-scared or disgusted by toilet humor. Or toilet drama. Is there such a thing as toilet drama? Aside from toddlers. Either way, not enjoyable. I can see the point of a survival horror video game, sure, that's just an adventure game or FPS with the tension cranked to max. Good times. Just not in passive media. Sitting there for two hours waiting for some hack of a writer / director to try to get me to piss myself and/or vomit? Not good times. Pea soup indeed. Alien at least had me dissecting the xenomorph with my eyes.

So hey, maybe my expectations of horror comics are a bit odd. Off. Ogg. Ohh baby that's what I like. Except what I like seems self-contradictory in the case of two webcomics.
The Last Halloween starts out as a goofy pastiche of horror movies peppered with some very gruesome character deaths. A little girl tries to survive the apocalypse by joining a monster adventuring party for a semi-coherent chain of quests.
False Positive starts out as a string of completely unrelated monster stories plus body horror. Shockingly well drawn for an internet thingamajig and also shockingly unpredictable at times through some unlikely yet still logical plot twists.

The Last Halloween eventually brought its background exposition to the forefront, tied everything together and pushed its scope past apocalyptic survival horror. And I love it.
False Positive eventually brought its background exposition to the forefront, tied everything together and pushed its scope past body monsters to apocalyptic melee. And I hate it.
More than just liking / hating where they went, it's about their respective initial potential.

The Last Halloween started out largely as the sort of facile, incoherent, ironically detached meta-humor deplored here last month with regard to The Order of the Stick's recent divine interventionism. It needed to go somewhere before that routine's rather limited lifespan ran out, just as OOTS needed to move past its initial aimless* dungeon crawl and DnD in-jokes to an actual plot and character development. Mona's grim nigh-apotheosis provided a truly inspired turning point toward the real story of the monsters' revolution / apocalypse: "what now?" It gained coherence by expanding its plot.

False Positive by comparison started quite strong. Each story was just shocking enough visually to induce morbid fascination, delivered its plot twist and appropriate gut-punch ending leaving the reader with a fondly repugnant memory. Much like SciFi, the Horror genre has thrived on short, concise formats, on anecdotal, internally coherent evolution of a system with mysterious starting conditions. When it finally monster-mashed its cast together, False Positive's resulting Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny ended up losing that play on expectations, devolving to a high fantasy battle of characters grunting and squinting at each other measuring the length and girth of their kamehamehas. Mr. Rogers in a blood-stained sweater would've made just as much sense as anything. It lost coherence by expanding its plot.

In addition, horror stories hinge on the characters' relative physical helplessness in the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. Hence why you're not cast as a dragon-demigod packing a tesla-rocket-laser launcher in survival horror games, but as an average schlub with (at best) the ability to toss rocks to distract your enemies. After the titular Last Halloween, Mona's world retains its menace. The monsters remain as powerful as ever but humans, having lost their social cohesion and lines of communication, have lost the ability to mount any sort of organized defensive. Even she herself as a legendary hero appears to be fighting a semi-effective skulking guerilla war.

False Positive's characters, being revealed as or having ascended to the status of cosmic forces, deprive their milieu of its necessary tension.







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*I suppose it wasn't entirely aimless. They were going down a level to go up a level.