"The Disease" from Hellbound Media - Reviewed!

John A. Short reviews Hellbound Media's Shock Value Presents: The Disease. A one-off, self-contained, full-colour American sized comic. Adapted by Paul Kane from his own prose story and painted in water colour by Pawel Kardis. This is a glossy, serious and professional product that wouldn't look out of place coming out of some big American comics company. Hellbound's stories have always been a little more straight-faced than most of my work (where humour nearly always creeps in), but this is another step in that direction. It belongs to the long horror tradition of 'body horror'… Where someone's very body is invaded and subsumed (Cronenberg's 'The Fly' for example) – in short, where your body becomes… monstrous. It's no secret that 'body horror' is so disturbing because it's a metaphor for disease. Here the metaphor is stripped away and Kane just goes for the visceral horror of the tale of a man overtaken by a terrible illness that warps his body. This probably wouldn't be as effective (and infecting) as it is without Kardis's shocking, photo-realistic painted art. No word of a lie – This is as good as anything produced by Alex Ross. He is as confident depicting the beauty of the semi-naked female form as he is the contents of a toilet bowel! His work is both hideous and gorgeous at the same time. Not for children or the faint hearted. If you care about comics as a medium for storytelling, do yourself a favour and pick this up at: http://www.hellboundmedia.co.uk/comic-book/the-disease-shock-value-presents