rowans ruin #1 Reviews 

A House Swap Goes Terribly Wrong in “Rowans Ruin” #1 [Review]

By | October 8th, 2015
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

House swaps are all fun and games until someone ends up with a haunted mansion. That’s the situation Katie finds herself in in “Rowans Ruin” #1. Read on for our review but be warned, there are some mild spoilers.

Written by Mike Carey
Illustrated Mike Perkins

What’s to Love: The team of Mike Carey (Suicide Risk, The Unwritten) and Mike Perkins (Deathlok) come together for the first time since 2005’s Spellbinders for a taut horror thriller set in their native England. If you’re a fan of horror films like Insidious and The Conjuring, or comics like Curse and Nailbiter, you’ll love how Rowans Ruin unfolds as it slowly clues you in on the terrifying secret that is at the heart of the story.

What It’s About: Katie has always had things pretty easy, growing up in comfortable circumstances in Florida. But when she finds herself with a long summer break before grad school, she decides to do a house-swap with a British girl, Emily, as a way to vacation relatively cheaply-and to get out from under her parents’ attentiveness. England is great, so different from Florida, and the house, called Rowans Rise, is charming. But soon she starts having nightmares-really, really, strong ones. Curious, Katie researches the owners of the house, and disc

Remember the movie The Holiday where Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet switch houses around Christmas time and end up falling in love? Imagine that but with one of the houses being haunted. That’s what we’re dealing with with “Rowans Ruin” #1 by Mike Carey and Mike Perkins except that this intends to scare us.

Katie is a young woman looking for a way to travel the world so she signs up for a house swap. She ends up getting the chance to go to England when another woman named Emily picks Katie’s apartment. Once in England, Katie finds herself instantly in love with her new surroundings and this big house. In the back of her mind though is the feeling that something isn’t completely right. She notices that electricity gets eaten up and her internal alarms go off when she starts to explore the house more, particularly Emily’s room. As the mysteries of “Rowans Ruin” begin to unfold, Katie get deeper and deeper into her own past issues.

“Rowans Ruin” #1 is a very good debut issue. Carey and Perkins do a lot with this issue as far as covering all their bases and do almost all the introductions they need to do allowing them a lot more wiggle room in the next three issues. This is a pretty standard and straight-forward horror story and while it doesn’t reinvent the genre, it does offer up a compelling narrative. Katie is not a typical horror story heroine in a few different ways. She’s not clueless that something is happening around her and so she spends a lot of time on alert, paying attention. Katie is also pretty likable. She’s got a great disposition and she’s genuinely excited, in a non-annoying way, to be visiting a new country.

What’s great about “Rowans Ruin” is that is really relies on it’s atmosphere. This is where artist Mike Perkins really excels in his work. The settings are authentic. There’s a true sense that we’ve left the United States and into a gorgeous, glamorized rendering of England. The trees, grass and flowers are all beautifully drawn with a lot of variation and depth. What’s really striking about the setting is how Katie interacts with it. The house feels like another character and for a story centered on a maybe haunted house, this is an incredibly important thing to do. Perkins gives life to the house by having it feel cold but not like somewhere no one has lived in. There’s a conflict with the house that’s shown through the coloring by Andy Troy. He creates different moods for different rooms and at times the house, even in light, feels scary thanks to the nice use of dark blues. The character expressions from Katie are very well done and always perfect to the given action. There’s something “old school” about this book but it’s not because of the writing. Perkins’ art is very similar to that of Robert Hack but the colors bring something else to the table. It brings a sense of modernity and a touch of gothic horror.

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“Rowans Ruin” #1 is a very good issue but it does have it’s share of problems. Emily is all but a mention. We don’t get to know her at all and while there’s still time to address this, this would have been a stellar first issue if the romantic subplot was shelved and Emily got the panel space. The romance wasn’t built into something so significantly deep that the book would suffer for it. In fact, that character was only introduced to give Katie someone to talk to about the house but I’m not sure so much time needed to be given to it so quickly.

“Rowans Ruin” #1 is a great choice for scary October comics so if you’re looking for something on the scary side to read this month, you could do far worse than this. The story is solid and the art is great. It’s a title that will resonate with a lot of fans and is already off to a nice start thanks to it’s lead character and pacing.

Final Verdict: 7.3 – This is off to a nice start and will hopefully keep up the momentum and deliver a memorable horror story.


Jess Camacho

Jess is from New Jersey. She loves comic books, pizza, wrestling and the Mets. She can be seen talking comics here and at Geeked Out Nation. Follow her on Twitter @JessCamNJ for the hottest pro wrestling takes.

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