Written By: Cullen Bunn
Art By: Tyler Crook
Published By: Dark Horse
Harrow County #1 was an issue that I loved. It was spooky, it was expertly paced, and the story had just the right mix of scary old legends and eerie foreshadowing. It was a great horror comic and I was convinced that the series would be everything I could want as a horror fan.
Unfortunately, issue #2 has almost none of the elements that made the first issue so good.
Harrow County #2 isn’t necessarily bad. There’s just so much of a contrast between the two issues that Harrow County #2 ends up coming off much worse that it would have if the first issue had merely been mediocre. Almost all of the problems here is due to the writing.
The first issue worked extremely well with it’s slow pacing and its hints towards something larger. We got some weird old legend about a witch, we got hints that Emmy may have some odd powers of her own, and Harrow County itself was given a mysterious vibe. The pace was perfect and gave us just enough information to keep us intrigued while still providing us some mystery.
Sadly, this second issue seems to throw all that out that door and hurriedly gets through major plot points that I would’ve thought would’ve occurred way further down the line. I can understand that it may have been Cullen Bunn’s way of getting through the story so he can get to the meat of it all but if that’s the case then I would’ve wished that he had just done it all in the first issue.
What’s even more frustrating is that we get some clues as to why certain stuff is happening but we still don’t have any clear reasoning. We’re instead left wondering what the big mystery is even as this seemingly huge reveal is leading to major repercussions. It’s an odd storytelling choice and I can’t say that it left me with any more information that hadn’t already been either explicitly told or heavily implied in issue #1.
I also have some problems with how Bunn writes Emmy. In the first issue she appeared to be a kind and naive country girl. The kind of girl who would chase a boy straight into mess of thorn bushes just to tell him that thorn bushes can be dangerous. She’s a tremendously likable character. Yet issue #2 begins with some downright bizarre behavior from her (or just about anyone really) when you consider that she was still asking people around her about the local legends that leave townsfolk spooked.
To put it in more modern terms, it would be like a kid walking around with a hook hand he found on his car door even though you just told him the old legend about the hook-handed man killing people on Lovers’ Lane.
I know it’s probably there to highlight Emmy’s odd powers we already got a taste of in the first issue but issue #2 does way too much way too fast and it all makes Emmy seem so naive and idiotic that it’s almost laughable. And it makes it incredibly hard to make the rest of the story actually spooky when Emmy is running around treating horrors like new friends.
Tyler Crook’s art continues to be gorgeous and he has some downright amazing panels in this issue. It’s nice having a softer art style that looks like watercolor on a horror title and his art is the only reason why this comic still manages to be a little spooky every now and then. Crook makes characters highly expressive and even does a great job at highlighting inanimate objects that are important to the story so that they too almost look alive.
Altogether I can see myself picking up at least one more issue just to see where the story is going and if there’s bigger things that Bunn has planned. But I also couldn’t be more disappointed in this second issue. I thought Harrow County was going to be my gothic horror comic dream come true but this second issue left me feeling like I’m going to have continue to wait for that dream to become a reality.
