Webcomic Weekly: Another Nigel Auchterlounie Bit Of Brilliance — ‘All It Wants Is Blood’

Webcomic Weekly, in which I attempt to confuse your concepts of time in continuing to call this one weekly. But no matter what the frequency, it’s still packed with so much great comics work. This week, the fourth WW appearance for Nigel Auchterlounie…

And I will not apologise for featuring Auchterlounie’s brilliant work for a fourth time. Because each and every time it’s been stunning stuff.

Always inventive, always entertaining, and this time it’s a horror tale – All It Wants Is Blood.

Auchterlounie’s one of those artists who just has too many ideas and, thankfully for us, puts them out there on Twitter (nobody’s seriously calling it X yet, are they?). So far, we’ve had Farts, a 93-part strange sitcom, the Dr Who parody Regenesis Of The Daleks, and Myosotis, a very strange, incredibly well-done thing about memory.

All It Wants Is Blood is Auchterlounie playing with horror and, as you’d expect, it’s so well crafted, a masterclass from an excellent storyteller in setting a scene and immediately sending that creeping feeling down your spine. A story in 15 tweets, 63 panels, sheer perfection in comics.

It all begins with a woman in custody…

From there we get the woman’s doctor and slowly, surely, brilliantly, we get an idea of what’s going on. It all takes place in the confines of the interview room, just four people involved, with Auchterlounie planting the seed of what’s going on in your head along with that sliver of fear about what’s going to happen…

I won’t show you much more of it, suffice it to say that Auchterlounie does it again. A self-contained story that’s all about the strangeness of the world and the possibilities of madness. Brilliant use of dialogue and expression to set the scene, then put a twist in, and finally to explode things in an ending that leaves you wondering what happens next. And all this, of course, from a man entertaining your children every week in the Beano.

But that’s the thing about great storytellers such as Auchterlounie, they can write for anyone, everyone, young or old, in a variety of genres. And every tale they tell, just like this one, is essential reading.

Now, before we go, one last set of panels… just enough to really make you want to go and read the rest…