I picked up Drew Zucker and Phillip Sevy's The House, because it has a basic concept that is apparently very appealing to me. A bunch of American GIs (and Nazi they captured) take shelter within a seemingly abandoned manor they find in the woods. They soon find the house is much stranger than they thought, but by then, they can't find a way out. Pretty much what I thought the plot of Ghosts of War was, and not too dissimilar to R-Point. It's a good starting point, to throw a bunch of guys who have been through some shit (and dealt with it in different ways) into a location that preys on that part of them, and which they can't simply shoot.
Zucker and Sevy don't bother trying too hard to introduce us to the GIs. We get their names via some caption boxes spread out over a few panels, but that's about it. I pretty much had to i.d. them based on if they wore anything distinctive. The sergeant has a full beard, Garcia wears glasses, the medic wears a red cap instead of a helmet.
But the story focuses on Private Harker, who Zucker draws as a slump-shouldered, shell-shocked looking guy most of the time. Harker's got something bad in his past, something to do with a him driving a car one night in the rain, but we don't find out the specifics of that until near the end. It's not really clear why Harker is the one most readily able to accept that things are messed up, once the house starts changing dimensions and stairs and doors start disappearing, but he is.
Zucker doesn't really draw the house in a way where there are many distinctive rooms, other than the one with the stairs. When the soldiers start searching the house, he tends to draw the panels tight around them. It limits our view of their surroundings, but also keeps the audience from developing any sense of where they are, or where they're supposed to be.
The horrors that house sends at them are a lot creepier looking the less distinct they are. When it gets left to Jen Hickman's coloring to show them as dark shadows with grinning teeth, they are really creepy, and it nods to the insubstantial, nightmare nature of them. When they take a more solid form, Hickman tries to color them differently, giving all the nightmares this sickly yellow-red that is stark contrast to the soldiers in their drab uniforms and their pasty faces. But I'm not sure the monsters don't still come out looking more ridiculous than frightening or creepy.
It feels like, for the GIs, Zucker and Sevy establish one rule for how the house works, but that they show it working another way in an earlier time. The first few pages are of two highwaymen who stumble across it fleeing the law. They seem to be attacked by zombies, and that seems to be it for them. But Harker eventually figures out, and this seems backed up by how things go, that the house and what it conjures can't physically do anything. Instead, it has to goad or trick them into doing it to each other or themselves. Otherwise, it could have killed Harker easily a half-dozen times. I'm not sure how reconcile that.
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