The second collection of author-illustrator Lash’s Wolff & Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre
comic book is for those who like their horror-comedy with a healthy portion of camp. This book is amusing and clever—but sometimes too clever. Some of the cultural references might fly right over the head of anyone under 30, and if too many stories are read in one sitting, preciousness overload sets in (bad puns abound.) But the niche that Lash’s work is aimed at will certainly appreciate Wolff & Byrd’s adventures. These level-headed and calm lawyers (who have their own problematic lives to contend with) play straight men to a parade of hapless monsters and other supernatural types as they are guided through their often pathetic legal complaints. The collected stories reinforce each other and further flesh out this off-kilter world where Dracula needs legal assistance to get rid of squatters, and a “swamp thing,” the Sodd of the title, is recruited by unscrupulous tree huggers as an unwitting spokesman. The art is a neat mashup of the styles of the romance and ghoul magazines the comics industry was pushing in the late 1960s, with an additional debt to the inking and shading of counterculture artist Spain Rodriguez. (Oct.)
