Random Comics Theatre
BONEYARD was a humourous fantasy/adventure comic by Richard Moore, published for 28 issues by NBM from 2001 to 2009, collected in seven volumes. Looks like they started a colour version of the books at one point, but that only got half-way through, and Moore did a oneshot at Antarctic Press in 2013, but nothing since, and the books seem to be mostly out of print (the one-shot is available digitally).
I heard some good things about the book over the years, but don't recall ever seeing the serialized comic when it was coming out (it's a pretty unusual format for the publisher, which mostly does European imports in deluxe formats), and very rarely saw the collections, usually stray copies of later ones, but somehow found this copy of the first one a few years ago, I think on a remainders table.
This collects the first four issues, setting up the series about Michael Paris, a young man who inherits a graveyard outside a small town, finding it inhabited by a variety of creatures, chief among them a vampire named Abbey. Hijinks, of course, ensue.
I thought this was pretty good, a bit rough around the edges but with a lot of entertaining bits, more than a few genuine laughs, a nice variety of character designs and decent storytelling in the art.
The format doesn't really do it any favours. It's about an inch wider and two inches taller than a standard American comic, and the artwork doesn't really need the extra size. It the whole series were available in a nicer format (say a dozen issues per book, standard comic size, maybe even large digest size) I'd probably check it out.
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