Unholy Nightmare #3 Review: Monster Mayhem Hits the Museum

WEPAAAA! Unholy Nightmare #3 walks into Chicago’s Field Museum, kicks the velvet ropes out the damn way, wakes up things that absolutely should have stayed dead, and basically turns museum night into the worst field trip in recorded history. Dolan Waddick and Aurelio Mazzara are not chasing quiet prestige-comic energy here, fam. This book wants monsters, capes, claws, ancient evil, mad science, busted walls and characters talking enough trash to make the undead reconsider getting back up. Better yet, issue three feels increasingly comfortable with exactly what Unholy Nightmare wants to be: a superhero-horror mashup with one foot planted in old-school monster mythology and the other stomping hard on the gas like somebody stole the brakes.

Waddick earns some of that carnage by slowing down first. Recluse and Jenny get meaningful room early in the issue, and their argument gives the book something more valuable than another pile of supernatural bodies. Jenny wants answers about why she became what she is, while Recluse remains chained to his mission, his guilt and the city he believes he failed. Their conversation gets heated, personal and appropriately messy. Nobody sounds like they showed up with a therapist-approved speech prepared in advance. Jenny’s brief childhood history, especially the silver bracelet passed down by her Romanian grandmother, adds another layer without dropping a whole encyclopedia on the reader’s head. Recluse being emotionally constipated enough to basically choose crime-fighting over answering the woman standing directly in front of him? Bruh. My guy can fight monsters, but communication apparently requires DLC.

Once Vlad gathers the crew, the personality clashes start doing serious work. Father Mario has zero patience for Dracula cosplay and supernatural ego trips. Trinacria carries herself like everybody else should already understand she is the most dangerous person in the room. Golem feels like somebody brought a wrecking ball to a dinner party. Miss Talbot brings pure feral energy, while Vlad orchestrates the whole dysfunctional operation with the smug confidence of a dude who has survived centuries and somehow learned absolutely nothing about team-building exercises. Waddick gives these characters recognizable voices, which matters with an ensemble this crowded. The trade-off comes when the issue starts explaining Dr. Herbert West, the Tome of Leviathan and the mechanics behind the threat. A few pages get chunky with exposition. The information is useful, but some of it could be tightened because the artwork is already selling plenty of the danger without needing every receipt stapled to the panel.

The sequencing is where this issue really starts cooking. Quiet character material gives way to the mission briefing, the briefing slides into infiltration, and then Waddick and company keep ratcheting the insanity upward without immediately blowing every surprise in the first five minutes. Smart move. The museum becomes more than a location. It becomes a giant supernatural toy box where history, horror and West’s reanimation experiments can start colliding. Once the trouble hits, the book crosscuts between different members of the team instead of letting everybody stand around one giant battle waiting for their turn to throw a punch. Recluse gets pulled into his own problem, Trinacria and Father Mario have their hands full, Golem gets exactly the kind of assignment a walking tank deserves, and Vlad is forced to watch his beautiful little master plan begin developing potholes. Page turns are used well too. Several reveals land because Mazzara lets the preceding page build tension before opening the visual floodgates. Old-school comics knew how to weaponize a page turn. Unholy Nightmare #3 remembers.

Aurelio Mazzara’s artwork brings the exact flavor this material needs. Big silhouettes. Aggressive angles. Heavy shoulders. Sharp teeth. Characters rarely enter a panel when they can crash into the joint like the rent is due. You can feel a strong 1990s superhero-comic pulse in the anatomy and action staging, but Mazzara mixes it with creature-feature grotesquerie instead of merely doing a nostalgia impersonation. Vlad’s design looks theatrical without becoming goofy, Recluse has enough tactical bulk to sell his street-level physicality, and Trinacria might be the visual MVP of the issue. Her green skin, serpentine ornamentation, gold armor and purple hair create a silhouette you can identify instantly across a crowded page. The monster designs stay readable too, which becomes crucial when the museum starts resembling supernatural rush hour. Some anatomy gets exaggerated and a few packed panels sacrifice spatial breathing room for sheer impact, but this is a book where excess is part of the menu. Asking it to behave politely would be like ordering mofongo and complaining somebody used garlic.

Gaetano Petrigno’s inks help keep all that visual aggression from turning into mush. Thick blacks carve out faces, costumes and monster forms, especially during the nighttime sequences where another approach could have flattened everything together. The line weight gives Recluse and Golem real mass while letting Vlad and Trinacria maintain cleaner supernatural shapes. Oscar Carreno then comes flying in with the color equivalent of turning the amp to eleven. Cold blues and purples hold the museum together, radioactive greens mark West’s resurrection nightmare, and bursts of orange and red slice through the page whenever the action needs heat. Trinacria’s gold against teal-green skin is especially effective. Carreno understands a crowded superhero-horror page needs color separation, not just pretty rendering, and his palette repeatedly guides the eye through chaos instead of letting everything fight for attention.

Bill Williams deserves his flowers too because lettering a book with this many characters, captions, creature voices and sound effects can become a traffic accident real quick. Dialogue remains readable through the majority of the issue, character-specific balloon treatments help separate the human from the decidedly non-human, and the sound effects actually participate in the action. They bend, stretch and hit with the artwork instead of hovering over it like stickers added five minutes before deadline. Some pages still carry more copy than they comfortably need, particularly when exposition and action occupy the same real estate. A slightly meaner editorial knife would give several panels more oxygen. Aaron Sparrow is already juggling a big cast and a dense mythology effectively, but trimming another ten percent of the explanatory dialogue could make the punches land twenty percent harder. Sometimes the monster smashing through the wall is the explanation, papi. We saw it.

What ultimately works about Unholy Nightmare #3 is confidence. Waddick and Mazzara are building a universe where Dracula, reanimation science, demons, vigilantes, ancient books, were-creatures and superhero theatrics can occupy the same block without the whole thing collapsing into parody. The comic knows it is outrageous. It enjoys being outrageous. Yet beneath all the monster smoke, Jenny wants to know who she is, Recluse is hiding inside responsibility, Vlad is discovering that leadership and control are two very different animals, and the team’s failure carries consequences beyond winning or losing one fight. Not every line needs to stay, and new readers may spend a minute figuring out who’s who when the entire supernatural roster hits the floor, but the storytelling remains clear enough to keep the ride moving. Unholy Nightmare #3 is loud, muscular, colorful indie comic-book insanity with actual craft underneath the noise. Mutant Farm Comics came to wreck the museum, mi gente, and yeah… somebody is definitely losing the security deposit.

CRUSADERS SCORE:
4/5

Writer: Dolan Waddick
Illustrator: Aurelio Mazzara
Inker: Gaetano Petrigno
Colorist: Oscar Carreno
Letterer: Bill Williams
Editor: Aaron Sparrow
Created By: Dolan Waddick & Aurelio Mazzara
Publisher: Mutant Farm Comics
Release: September 2026