It’s done now; you can judge for yourself. But…yeah, it is.

For many years, “horror” in comics was defined by the past – by the dearly loved and badly maligned EC Comics of the 1950’s, by the sparse and mostly silly ‘monster’ comics or take-offs on the Universal movies of the 1930’s and 40’s that flit through the various universes (do we have to enumerate them? Werewolf by Night, Man-Thing, Tomb of Dracula, etc. Do we even have to mention low points like Morbius?) Some of the franchises have had momentary spasms of quality, like Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing or Steve Niles’ 30 Days of Night, but even the best of them have been gimmicky and/or gory (not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Still, Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez had something special and almost unique in Locke & Key from IDW. Thoughtful, careufully paced, original, fascinating. L&R didn’t launch off any of the overtired icons of the past hundred years; it built some icons of its own. The artwork was rarely bloody and always intensively precise; the language was the polar opposite of florid or purple: these are real people in an increasingly unreal situation, but it mattered. It brought, and continues to bring, a whole new level of quality to horror in particular and graphic storytelling in general. You can produced comic books that actually have some weight and respect, even some dignity, and you can do it on a regular basis, for years.

If you’re Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez, anyway.

The plot if Locke & Key is a little difficult to summarize. It stars once upon a time near San Fracisco, when a decent guy, a school counselor and a father of three, is brutally killed by one of students – a friend of his oldest son. The remains of the family flee back to New England and the family home there – a home where a host of very strange keys to even stranger doors, leading to places and offering powers that they’d never dreamed of before. And revealing the secret history of the Locke family that gradually shows you the story didn’t start in the San Francisco Bay at all; it started in Lovecraft a generation earlier (no, actually, hundreds of years earlier), and the evil that was born there hasn’t died. It’s just been waiting for the Lockes to return. And it wants revenge.

Great stuff: eerie and ugly and often beautiful, and it’s taken Hill and Rodriguez fully six years to tell the full story in multiple acts.  The last ‘floppy’ finally made it out a few months ago; the last compilation, Locke & Key: Omega (including the story arc called “Omega” and the coda called “Alpha”) was published just a little while ago, in early February.

Hill has written three novels – Heart-Shaped Box, Horns, and NOS4A2 – each on better than the last. And he’s written short stories and other comics and even collaborated with his father, Stephen King, on a few pieces. But here at AmityvilleNow.com International HQ, Locke & Key stands out as his magnum opus – at least to date – and the kind of thing that any fan of smart, deep, affecting horror should be reading, even if he/she’s never touched a funnybook before.

All six of the compilations of Locke & Key are available here. Or do yourself a favor and go to your nearest independent comics store to buy them, and just browse. Here there be wonders.

So are we right? Is Locke & Key the best horror comic ever? Leave your comments below…