Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter complete series (vol. 1-4)

***As a special bonus for buying out my web store, I am including the audio commentary of all four volumes for free! (a $40 value).***

Do you love crazy stories filled with monsters, magic, and humor?

Have you ever read about H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands and thought..."I wish this was funnier and gorier"?

Are you excited by stories that keep you on your toes and make you question the very fabric of reality?

Then you'll love Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter.

Ichabod Jones is about a mental patient that escapes an asylum and becomes a monster hunter during the Apocalypse, but doesn't know if he's killing monsters, humans, or if it's all in his head the whole time.  It's a complete fantastical and psychological mindscrew.

Ichabod comes from a deep, almost primordial, place in my soul. It's the part that devours movies like In the Mouth of Madness, Event Horizon, and Jacob's Ladder, while still binging on Gravity Falls, Frankenweenie, and Army of Darkness. It's the part that read Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and laughed hysterically at every gruesome scene.

Ichabod has been imprisoned in a mental asylum for crimes he definitely committed. When he was arrested, the police found him wrist-deep in the guts of his latest victim.

While he's never claimed he was innocent, he says he only committed atrocious acts because an authoritative, and unwelcome, voice in his head told him he was doing God's work.

He tried to say no to the voice, but it was very insistent and persuasive. It told Ichabod that the people he was killing were monsters and he was saving the world by murdering them.

He was wrong...or so he thought.

At the beginning of the story, Ichabod wakes up in the Apocalypse, being chased by a monster trying to devour his soul. He has no choice but to use his training as a monster hunter to fight off the beast, and accept his fate as the savior of the world.

He meets a band of other inmates, helps them escape the asylum, and they begin their long journey across the desert to freedom, trying to carve out a bit of humanity as they go.

Something strange happens to Ichabod throughout the story, and I say strange in a tale that is already at 11 on the strange meter.

Every now and then...he snaps back to another place, where he's sitting with his doctor, talking out what just happened to him, or on the run from the law, and definitely NOT in the Apocalypse.

Is he really there, is it a memory, or is he having a psychological break?

It's that juxtaposition between reality and perception that makes Ichabod special. It's not just an Apocalypse story, or a dark fantasy tale, or a chosen one book. It also messes with your very perception of the universe, and whether Ichabod is truly a hero, or a psychopath killing the innocent.

After all, he was wrong about being a savior once, and that's what got him locked away in the first place. What's to say he's not wrong again, only now he's having a much more vivid hallucination?

Or perhaps he's only fantasizing about being a hero, while being locked in his cell, unable to smell freedom ever again.

Ichabod isn't about some mental patient who's ruthlessly killing people. It's about a broken man, who was cast off by society, and whether that person, a person who nobody wants, can be a hero.

Can he find his place in the world? Can he come to terms with everything that he's done? Can he become a hero?

I'm very interested in that idea, as a person who is severely broken myself. I've had depression and anxiety for as long as I can remember, and it's getting worse with every passing year.

I never felt like I fit in for the first 30 years of my life. It wasn't until I went out into the world and became the hero of my own story that I started to think that maybe I wasn't the worst human being on the planet.

Ichabod, though, came from a place where I was: very much alone, broken, and wondering if it would ever get better.

I think what makes Ichabod really special is that it was started by a person who never knew if he could be fixed, one who felt like he was cast off from society, and now it's being written by a person who understands that the broken bits are what make him special.

See, Ichabod, at its core, is about hope. It's about taking what's special about you and using it to bring light into the world; of shining hope in a bleak universe. Ichabod's world is harrowing and awful, but Ichabod can bring light into it, not despite being broken, but because of it.

***As a special bonus for buying out my web store, I am including the audio commentary of all four volumes for free! (a $40 value).***

REVIEWS:

*****

I think I was either 14 or 15 the first time I met Russell Nohelty and he pitched to me a book with ripped corners and a falling apart spine. It was my first time attending Long Beach Comic Con (or was that first one Expo, who knows?) and I believe that it was his as well. Because at the time I had no money of my own it was a lot of haggling on both ends to get to a price that my mother approved of, but it happened. So I walked out of the convention with not only my first copy of Ichabod Jones but a free crappy drawing from both Russell and his table mate at the time.

I don’t even remember why I had stopped at the booth (I do- it was the promise of a free crappy drawing) but I remember that the artwork on the table was really quite amazing. I’ve always been the weird child in my house, I’ve loved and suspenseful works of media for as long as I can remember and as such the first look at the cover did intrigue me to stay and read the first couple of pages. And well... I became the proud owner of a paperback version of Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter.

-A Pirate

*****

This is dark and oddly humorous. Violence I can easily handle in the right context, but gore is difficult for me. In this case, this gore fit perfectly with the story and didn’t overshadow the action and psychological conflict fueling the narrative.

-Toinette

*****

I found this story disturbing yet cleverly written. The artwork is superb and between that and the very clever dialogue, this story is impressive.

-Amazon Customer

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