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Adam Jaeger seems like a nice guy. He’s a little awkward, in a charming way, and he has stepped out of his comfort zone to attend a college party. Unfortunately, the evening takes a catastrophic twist when a massacre occurs and Adam is the only survivor. Not just that, the art student is covered in blood and is fairly certain that he transformed into the Wolf Man and slaughtered everyone.

The creative team of writer Joshua Williamson and artists Leomacs and Pip Martin set things up very nicely. The reader gets brief glimpses of the carnage – enough to understand how nasty things got at the party, but not so much that it’s a gorefest. Williamson quickly develops Adam’s personality, and you can imagine him being a softspoken, disarming young man. Adam’s complicated relationship with his father is also succinctly established through Williamson’s dialogue and the art team’s renderings.

They provide quite a few breadcrumbs hinting that something terrible happened to Adam’s brother Felix and his mother. There are also moments when a human character comes off as a monster while Adam looks far less than predatory. That is a hallmark of the Universal monster movies, especially the Wolf Man who feels desperate to prevent himself from harming anyone. With a talent like Williamson behind the wheel, the latest in Skybound’s Universal Monsters line is off to a great start.

-Amanda Sheriff