• Authors: Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti
• Illustrations: Adam Archer
• Publisher: Wildstorm & DC Comics
• Publishing year: 2007
• Pages: 144
• Cover: Ryan Sook, Tim Bradstreer & Grant Goleash
• ISBN: 978-1401214593

Review:

If I say: “Jason, hockey mask, machete and Crystal Lake”, what would the first thing be that pops up in your mind? Right, Friday the 13th! Jason Voorhees must be one of the most recognisable villains in a horror movie franchise that ever existed. Funny idea if you know the history of the movies. But those movies (those who follow me know that I recently rewatched all of the movies in the franchise and saw my reviews on this blog)

Jason Voorhees was only the antagonist since Friday the 13th Part 2 and has since become a legendary serial killer with over 200 (movie) kills (so far). So it was only normal that one day someone would think: “How van we expand the world of Jason?” and made a graphic novel that did just that.

And so came to be the collection of six issues, simply called Friday the 13th.

A young woman is found naked and covered in blood on the road by an elder couple in a camper. They are just in time to save her from a dreadful death because in the woods someone or something lurks, an evil we all know… she is taken to hospital where she remains in a catatonic state while the sheriff is trying to find out what happened to her friends who were at Camp Crystal Lake, trying to clean it up to accommodate new campers and children.

And while the sheriff has a theory to what happened to her friends and the camp leaders, the true story is one that has been happening at those grounds for centuries already. Blood and killing, drownings and a legacy all trapped in a single body, that of Jason Voorhees, the boy who drowned but got to live somehow! And his blood thirst is insatiable!

In October I rewatched every Friday the 13th movie so I thought ‘Why not the comics as well’… (I only have a few of those and honestly don’t how many more there are or were as I don’t think they’ll be available anymore)

This graphic novel expands on the mythos that was already established in the movies. But apart from that, it offers the same things the movies offered: sex, drugs, carnage and silly teenagers.

I love how the comics pay tribute to the movies by mentioning the fact that possible copycats took the hockey mask and started a killing spree (this has happened in Part V, how the mother, Mrs Voorhees, killed the counsellors in retribution to the death of her son, how the lake seemed to be a way to resurrect the dead and of course, Jason who loves to kill a group one by one, how Jason could be a demon…

Just when you thought you escaped the horror of Crystal Lake, you see the shimmer of metal in the dark.