Review by Win Wiacek

Are you sick? Are you depraved, demented or just plain not right?

If so, it’s not necessary – but it won’t hurt either – if you pick up this darkly wicked little tome to reaffirm your skewed view of reality.

First seen in 2005, I Luv Halloween spawned two further paperback volumes, a hardback Ultimate Edition in full-colour and, latterly, digital editions. All are similarly converted from moody monochrome to gaudy sunset shades and blood-spatter hues thanks to the tender ministrations of Michael Kelleher and Glasshouse Graphics.

Halloween is primarily where kids of varying ages go mooching about begging for sweets and threatening mayhem. It used to be about predatory monsters roaming the land, terrorising the citizenry and making mischief. Here, those worlds collide and collude.

Every Halloween, Finch, Moochie, Pig Pig, Bubbles and Squeek, Li’l Bith, Mush and the rest of the kids get together for their annual sugar-coated loot-fest. This year it’s all botched up from the get-go because the very first old lady they accost just gives them fruit, and everyone knows if you don’t get candy right from the start it’s nothing but rubbish all evening. Drastic steps have to be taken, or else this Halloween is ruined! You don’t know drastic until you see what this band of masked reprobates get up to. These are not your average trick-or-treaters.

Along the way you’ll also meet that friendly old policeman, the vicious, bullying older kids and that really stacked chick who lives next door as well as her doofus boyfriend. See their ultimate fates and give thanks it’s just a comic!

And as the night unfolds – with each kid given his/her/its own chapter to play in – we’ll see that theirs is a very bleak and nasty kind of fun with a vicious undercurrent to the shenanigans. You might even call it tragic.

Comics veteran Keith Giffen flexes his comedy – and bad taste – muscles in an irresistible confection that would win nodding approval from Charles Addams and the producers of any self-respecting splatter movie. The jovial malice is uniquely captured by the totally enchanting art of Benjamin Roman, whose inexplicably charming grotesques are the stuff of any animation studio’s dreams. Just check out the stupefying Sketchbook section and frankly alarming Creator Bio feature.

Toys based on these sick puppies will sell and sell and sell – if you can bear to liberate them from any stout packaging or go to sleep in the same room as them.

If you have no fear of the dark, if you love a gross joke, have a soft side that can be hit by a brilliantly sad twist or two and especially if you don’t care what your immediate family or the clergy think of you, then you really want to read this book. Over and over and over and over again. Amen!