Houdini: The Man From Beyond

by Brian Haberlin, Jeff Phillips, Gilbert Monsanto

Celebrate the anniversary of the death of a legend with his greatest escape of all! On the eve of the Wall Street collapse of 1929, Harry Houdini makes the ultimate He returns from the dead in the guise of a young stockbroker and partners with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to prevent his wife Bess from being murdered. Their search calls into question Houdini's own demise and brings them into contact with such period luminaries as Aleister Crowley and Charles Lindbergh as they uncover a cult that threatens to unlock the secrets of eternity.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Comics

160 pages, Paperback

First published May 18, 2005

About the author

An award-winning comic book artist, writer, editor and producer, Brian began his career in comics working at Top Cow Productions, where he co-created the Witchblade franchise. He co-founded Avalon Studios, which published many successful fantasy and sci-fi titles, including: Stone, Aria, Area 52 and M-Rex to name a few.

Brian also served for two years as Editor-in-Chief of Todd McFarlane Productions and penciled and inked its flagship title, Spawn. He currently writes and illustrates Faster Than Light and the upcoming Fury Formula comics series. Brian teaches comic art at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and his work is in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian Museum.

Reviews

[Angel Torres · Rating 2 out of 5]

IMPORTANT! (NO SPOILERS): This story is great and the art is fantastic. BUT it must be known that this story has BIG spoilers on the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels, specially in the finale. So be careful when you approach it.

[Stacy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The art style was worth the read, even if the plot was not.

[Rob · Rating 1 out of 5]

Brian Haberlin's characterization of Houdini is inconsistent throughout this fictional narrative of the King of Cards coming back from the dead to inhabit the body of a stockbroker and save his wife from a villain. Houdini discovers the villain's true identity by reading a manuscript and making a super weak connection between the antagonist in that script and the alias that the ne'er-do-well is using. The narrative skips like a record in places; how or why did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle end up in Lake Erie? There are some deus ex machina that occur without explanation that smell more of bad writing than anything else. It is also fascinating that for all of Haberlin's research into the period, readers are given that the tension between Houdini and Conan Doyle was caused by their difference of opinion regarding Spiritualism. There is no mention of the fact that Conan Doyle's second wife tried and failed to deceive Houdini, claiming to channel the illusionist's dead mother. Aleister Crowley, Melvin Purvis, Jack Parsons, Leopold and Loeb, and others are pulled into this badly executed romp through one of my favorite eras for weird history. I would have been delighted to see them all if this story was any good. Picked it up through the MyComicShop.com weekly $1 auction, annnd I now completely understand why.

[Peacegal · Rating 2 out of 5]

This graphic novel wasn't what I was expecting at all. Instead of a graphic bio of the famous magician, we get a silly and hard-to-follow story, rendered inexplicably in blue ink and scaled down to eye-straining proportions.

[Steve Joyce · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Art: average or slightly above. Suffers from being reproduced at such a small size.

The Story: kind of silly and convoluted.

Apparently the creators of this graphic novel were aiming at a homage to Houdini and his contemporaries. If so, they unfortunately missed the bulls eye.