Cradlegrave
Writer: John Smith
Artist: Edmund Bagwell
Letterer: Ellie De Ville
Publisher: 2000AD/Rebellion
Publication Date: 2011
I was looking for a less-obvious horror comic to wrap up my Halloween season reading, and, thankfully, that search took me to Cradlegrave, writer John Smith and artist Edmund Bagwell’s story that was first serialized in 2000AD a little over a decade ago. Recommended to me by a couple of friends who know 2000AD’s output well, Cradlegrave is a grounded-but-terrifying slowburn of a comic that haunts you with a dire mix of difficult reality and touches of the strange.
The broad strokes of this story are that Shane Holt is released from a prison for young offenders, having served an eight-month stint for arson. He returns home to during a summer heat wave to his family in the Ravenglade Estate, its sign vandalized to instead read Cradlegrave Estate. From there, Shane grapples with reintegration into a blighted community that wider society has neglected, if not entirely written off. There’s a strike on and no one is picking up trash. Police do not respond when called. And young people like Shane go in and out of prison frequently.
This is a horror comic built atop a real world that is already scary. There’s a monster and some truly striking body horror in this book, but it is all set equally against the horror of a community being abandoned by those in power. It’s a credit to the creative team how well the reality of this book is rendered, in everything from the gritty visuals to the patter of the characters.
Bagwell’s cartooning strikes the perfect level of realism, and it also panels out the pages in a way that heightens its themes, ranging from claustrophobic to full-on disturbed. What results is a book that reads densely at the start as the audience is getting acclimated to the world and characters, before accelerating to a terrifying pace as it reaches its shocking and grotesque conclusion.
And Smith’s scripting is as patient as it is poignant. The entire first act of the book is written in a way that lets the horror of Shane’s day-to-day life drive it. There isn’t so much as a hint at the body horror to come for a good long while, and the book is all the better for it. This decision makes the fantastical terror that does come feel earned. There’s also an element of disorientation to the scripting here that serves Cradlegrave well. I found that as I read, I was equal parts terrified by Shane dealing with the threat of a local drug dealer as I was by the monster. I never quite knew what was coming next, but I knew any level of awful was in play.
Indeed, this is a comic that is very difficult to predict, or at least it was for me. The nature of what’s happening under the surface is directly revealed about 2/3s of the way through, and I didn’t really see it coming at all. It felt satisfying though, as rich with monstrous visuals as it was with metaphoric impact, serving as a stand-in for the way that drug addiction disproportionately impacts the disenfranchised and forgotten.
Overall, I found Cradlegrave to be an excellent read. I was looking for a less-obvious comic this Halloween season, and I certainly found it here, within a book that wants you to think about the way rot and desperation and depravity slowly creep in, changing what you’re willing to do and what you will accept as life as your world slowly turns squalid.
Cradlegrave is currently available from the 2000AD Shop.
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English (US) · 