Welcome to the First Issue Bin, where I — Ethan Kaye — randomly grab one of this week's comics that’s just starting up and give you the details on whether it should get added to your collection … or remain on the comic shop shelf.
Universal Monsters: The Mummy #1
Writer/Artist: Faith Erin Hicks
Color Artist: Lee Loughridge
Letterer: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
Editor: Alex Antone
Image's retellings of classic Universal monster films have been uniformly enjoyable. Instead of rehashing the plots to films like Dracula and The Creature From the Black Lagoon, the writers focus in on peripheral characters and tell the tales from their eyes. For James Tynion IV's Dracula, it was an extra creepy Renfield, Dracula's bug-eating assistant. For Michael Walsh's Frankenstein, it was a child whose father's parts were sewn into the monster. It gives these stories new life and makes them much more relatable; instead of straightforward plots like the original films conveyed, there is so much more feeling and insight into these people.
Faith Erin Hicks's The Mummy doesn't break from this conceit and we're all the better for it. The focus isn't on the Egyptologists in the first issue, or even the titular mummy, it's all on 16-year-old Helen Grosvenor, played in the original 1932 film by Zita Johann (who was 28 when The Mummy came out; old studios could never convince themselves to cast teenagers to play teenagers). Helen's conflict isn't with long-dead corpses, it's with the cost of being a child of mixed parents. Her mom is Egyptian while her father is a proper stuffy Englishman, heading up a dig in Thebes and forcing his daughter to attend a proper stuffy British school there.
And just like that, the story is infused with life, stakes, and a relatable personality.
As far as mummies go, there aren't many in this first issue. Helen goes from a 7-year-old in 1912, watching in awe as her father mistreats the local workers, to a bitter 16-year-old in 1921, desperately wanting to ingratiate herself with a crowd of "cool" Egyptian kids whose parents work for her father. The social gap is too wide. She has opportunities and influence where they do not, shown clearly as she gets them into a dance club that they were previously booted from. Helen hates the British kids she goes to school with, but finds little common ground with the in-crowd, other than Essam, a boy she is crushing on.
I'm talking so much about this culture disconnect because it really hits you like lightning when you're reading this issue. Helen's dad reads a scroll, wakes up a mummy, and causes Helen to connect with a past self, but that almost seems like the dry bones around which a much more engaging story is told. In fact, the mummy's entire role in this issue is to stand up, surprise Mr. Grosvenor, and walk across the dunes. Helen's story is where it's at, this clash of cultures, this spark of young love, and this connection to her Egyptian heritage that I feel will propel the rest of the series. Image presents Universal Monsters: The Mummy Helen.
The art fits squarely into Hicks's body of work, with straightforward actions punctuated by enormously expressive faces. It works well with the story she's telling, one of personal reactions to actions rather than conflicts or chases or 30-on-1 battles like you'd see in a typical superhero book. It's got Hicks's style all over it and it fits well within her canon. Likewise, the color work by Loughridge is absolutely divine, contrasting the heat of the desert in warm colors with the cool relaxation of the city when the sun goes down.
If you were expecting mummy chases and big spooky monsters jumping out of dark corners, this book isn't for you. But if you appreciate a slow burn story that focuses on exploring a character's heart rather than extracting it, this is a great book that stays with you.
Presence of a mummy: 2/5
Presence of Helen: 6/5
Kids dancing like in 'Peanuts': 5/5
Envy that everyone gets to eat Egyptian food and I don't have any: 5/5
Jump scares: 1/5
Hellz yeah fuck colonialism: 4/5
Verdict: Image's Universal Monsters series has zigged where everyone expected them to zag, and it's producing some absolutely incredible work from talented people. This one may not leave the others in the dust, but it's an essential part of this collection.
