Commentary after the jump.

Now we get a look at who else the coach is carrying.  Light load.  Just a father with a daughter of indeterminate age and an older priest.  Guess there’s not a lot of people who want to ride out into the haunted frontier after dark.  Or maybe I didn’t want to invent any other characters.  Could be.

Oh yeah, and there’s the werewolf who’s now chewing on the lead horse.

This was one of my favorite pages out of chapter one, mostly for the great shot of the coach and the werewolf taking it down.  But it was also tricky, since I didn’t want to give too much of the monster away so quickly.  That last panel was actually redrawn to obscure the wolf even further, which probably wasn’t needed, given the size I was going to print the book at.

But, truth be told, I’m always going to err on the side of showing less, not more.  I’m not a big believer in over the top gore or shock scenes.  This does come around to bite me on the butt later, and things get overly dark and overly shadowy in an effort to promote atmosphere over visual scares.  It’s a tricky balance.  Have I said that before.

Remember, in horror comics, the reader gets to control the pace.  Comics reading is much more active than movie viewing.  In a movie (not a video), the viewer is subject to the whims of the director (and editor) and all they can do is close their eyes or bite their nails.  Comics readers can flip around, stop time, change which slice of time they’re looking at, flip forward effortlessly.  This is why real horror is hard to pull off (and I’m not suggesting that I have, just making a statement about the mechanics at work.)  You can toss bucketfuls of blood and guts and have bad guys violating victims in all kinds of horrible ways, but I’m not sure that exactly makes for real horror.

However, I’m a guy who has, with a straight face, recommended CHINATOWN and FIGHT CLUB as examples of “modern” horror movies, so I may be insane.

So, I wonder.  What happens when you take out a coach’s lead horse at speed?  Bet it isn’t pretty.

But you’ll have to wait until Monday to find out.