Monster House (2006) Review: This House Has Teeth!

Yo, fam, remember when a creepy house in the neighborhood was enough to ruin your whole summer? Not a demon from another dimension, not some billionaire in a Halloween costume. Just that one busted-looking crib everybody knew to stay away from. Monster House, IDW’s 2006 comic tie-in, takes that childhood fear and throws a bunch of knuckleheads into it. The result is a weird little horror joint with enough attitude, busted bones and bad decisions to keep me turning pages.

First, let’s get something straight. This isn’t a straight comic-book retelling of the animated movie. The book serves up two stories that play around with the movie’s world and its nasty centerpiece. The longer one, Skull & Bones, follows a rock band whose ambitions and spectacularly questionable judgment bring them into contact with a house that should’ve come with about seventeen warning signs. You know the type, fam. Everybody wants to be a star until the gig starts eating the talent.

Joshua Dysart doesn’t waste much time pretending these characters are destined to save the world. They’re loud, impulsive, and just believable enough as a struggling band to make their troubles entertaining. The opening establishes their personalities through arguments and frantic decisions, then lets the horror creep in while the group is busy worrying about its own problems. That’s a fun approach because the characters don’t know they’re in a monster story yet. We do. So every time somebody decides to get a little closer to that house, I’m sitting here like, “Bro, you seriously doing this?”

Simeon Wilkins brings a rough, expressive look that suits the material. His characters stretch into ugly panic faces, the neighborhood has that lived-in suburban weirdness, and the action gets wonderfully chaotic once the house stops pretending to be real estate. There are panels where the building feels less like a location and more like an enormous animal with terrible manners. Wilkins also understands the value of holding on a quiet exterior before letting the next violent movement wreck the page. That’s comic-book horror doing its job, baby.

Len O’Grady’s colors deserve their flowers, too. The dirty greens, dusky reds, washed-out daylight and murky interiors keep this thing from looking like a shiny movie brochure. Even the brighter sequences have something vaguely unhealthy about them. Tom B. Long’s lettering handles all the yelling, crashes and creature noises without turning the panels into a traffic jam. There’s a lot of racket in this comic, and the lettering knows exactly when to crank it up.

Now, the pacing ain’t flawless. The band’s early antics take a little while to connect with the central horror, and a few character beats are broader than they need to be. Once the house really cuts loose, though, the pages get meaner and faster. One sequence turns the building into a gaping, timber-and-teeth nightmare, and that’s the kind of visual payoff I want from a book called Monster House. Don’t promise me a homicidal home and then spend the whole issue talking about the property taxes, coño.

The backup, Honor Roll, gives Wilkins the writing and art duties, with O’Grady back on colors. It has a different rhythm, with more emphasis on the people trying to make sense of what happened and the strange history hanging over the neighborhood. I like that the second story doesn’t simply repeat the first one’s monster attack. It expands the feeling that this place has left a mark on everybody who got too close. Still, the switch can feel abrupt after the louder opening adventure, and some of its ideas could’ve used a few more pages to breathe.

Here’s why I still have a good time with this old-school oddity: it knows how to be a comic. Not a stack of film screenshots. Not a lazy merchandise pamphlet. Dysart, Wilkins and the rest of the crew take a familiar movie premise and give it their own visual personality, complete with grimy character work and a genuinely grotesque living house. Twenty years later, the storytelling has a few creaky floorboards, but the monster still bites. If you’re a fan of the movie, forgotten IDW tie-ins or horror comics with a little punk-rock stupidity in the bloodstream, this one deserves a look. WEPAAAA! The Crusade Never Ends!

Crusaders Score:
3.5/5

Skull & Bones: Joshua Dysart (writer), Simeon Wilkins (artist), Len O’Grady (colorist)
Honor Roll: Simeon Wilkins (writer and artist), Len O’Grady (colorist)
Letterer: Tom B. Long
Editor: Kris Oprisko
Designer: Neil Uyetake
Based on characters created by: Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab
Publisher: IDW Publishing
Released: June 2006