Graphic Novel Review: Richard Corben’s DIMWOOD is a late career burst of gothic horror brilliance

Dimwood

Cartoonist, Script Pages 1 – 105: Richard Corben
Color Flats, Preliminary Color, Script Pages 106 – 120: Beth Corben
Project Art Director and Additional Color: José Villarrubia
Letterer: Nate Piekos
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Publication Date: June 2025

If you’ve somehow missed it, Dark Horse Comics is currently publishing a series of gorgeous hardcover books that collect and restore the work of the late American comics master, Richard Corben. The project began in May 2023, with the publication of Murky World, which collected a series of comics Corben published in the 2010s, split between Dark Horse and Heavy Metal. Murky World is a fine comic — it’s still Corben, and Corben as established was a master — but it is certainly not one of the works one thinks of as among Corben’s best. Some of those books came soon after Murky World, however, when Dark Horse published Corben’s other-world body-swap fantasy epic, Den, across five volumes from 2023 to early 2025.

Den was a more interesting choice, as those comics had been somewhat notoriously hard to find, at least during my time as a comics reader. This was the first time I’d been able to read them in full, and the new hardcovers — with art direction and color restoration work by José Villarrubia, himself one of the industry’s comics colorists — delivered them in beautiful, oversized books. There was a feeling of accessing a lost part of comics history throughout the five Den hardcovers, and that made for an extra thrill. Now, the line has segued into new, equally-as-thrilling territory still with the publication of Dimwood.

Dimwood is a familial gothic body horror tale. It has a classic horror setup, in which a young woman returns home after many years away…to find something amiss. And then she learns that maybe, just maybe, it was always amiss. Layer in murder and some truly disturbing monstrous degeneration, and you’ve got all the ingredients for a horror romp, just elevated with the storytelling visuals and micro decisions of a master within the genre. 

See, Dimwood was the book that Corben was working on when he passed away in 2020. In fact, as noted in the credits at the top of this piece, the book was not entirely complete at the time of his passing. The artwork as mostly finished, but Corben’s daughter, Beth Corben Reed, scripted the final 14 pages. Dimwood is perhaps a project that was close to being lost forever, but — like the rest of this line — has now gotten a publication format that’s very much worthy of the story, the cartoonist and his august place in comics.

And you can certainly feel Corben’s late career gravitas throughout Dimwood, to be sure. It’s not Corben’s most experimental work (although he did use things like 3-D model heads as references, a choice that shows within some of the most exaggerated character work from any of Corben’s comics), and it’s not a top-line Corben classic. But this book does posses a combination of unreal plant-based body horror with the polished narrative storytelling chops of someone who’d dedicated so much of his life to both horror and comics. Throughout, the reader is in the hands of a master. The book has an earned sense of assuredness that puts the reader at ease, even as the story on the page goes to dark and disturbing and violently unreal places.

The feeling of reading Dimwood actually reminded me of a film I saw this year, that being David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds. To date, The Shrouds might be my favorite movie of 2025, and while it’s not Cronenberg’s best (hell, it might not even be in his Top 5), there’s just such a sense of mastery and assuredness to the film. Cronenberg has finely-honed his craft, and that has enabled him to make a movie that shouldn’t work but is still a stunner. 

And, to be sure, neither Dimwood nor The Shrouds is likely to find a wide audience. The Shrouds is a narratively jerky, not-quite-romantic comedy about graveyards and death. Dimwood features the sort of hyper-stylized comics art that you’ll occasionally hear more traditional readers rallying against in comic book shops, unable to tell poor art from art that looks off-putting deliberately. There’s plenty of that in Dimwood, faces that bear a doll-like aesthetic that are perfectly designed to both convey emotion and make the reader uncomfortable.

The one real tragedy of the book, of course, is that Corben himself did not live to finish it. The scripting in the last pages does not lose anything from the rest of the book, and, indeed, if I didn’t know going in that he hadn’t entirely completed it, there’s nothing in this book that would alert my otherwise. Beth Corben does a wonderful job scripting the ending of this story in her father’s voice. But still, you have to wonder if and how it might have been just a little bit different had the master himself lived to see it through. Or maybe I’m just sad that Dimwood is the last new Corben graphic novel.

But there are, of course, many more restorations coming within this line of hardcovers, and I’ll be there for them all.

Dimwood is available now from Dark Horse Comics

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