In Review: GraveWorms by Rob Talbot

By Graham Baines on December 15, 2025 • ( 0 )

Review by Graham Baines

The Comic: A love letter to all the great – and even the not so great – horror comics of yore. Over 44 black and white pages, horrible hosts “The Baroness” and “The Executioner” present four short, sharp shocks in the time-honoured EC / Creepshow fashion, with no small amount of bickering between themselves in the process! Monsters on the rampage, gateways to the beyond and the modern music industry laid bare are just a few things you can expect from this putrid pot-pourri.

It’s the first ever solo comic project from Rob Talbot, a former teacher and music events organiser, who spent a decade and a half writing for horror-ific movie fan organs like Scream, Diabolique and Starburst, before deciding he’d actually quite like to create something of his own instead of constantly thinking and writing about the work of others…

Recklessly not letting the fact that he hadn’t drawn anything for over 20 years get in Rob’s way, the horrifying results speak for themselves! Dare ye enter the realm of… GraveWorms?

The Review: GraveWorms is strange – and that is a compliment. The fourth wall become a fifth wall in this hyper real, post Land’s Acclerationists idea of a comic, if you blended some Marvel/DC with Japanese Knotweed and a funny mushroom.

It’s frenetic, knowing, and, as Rob Talbot announces at the start, full of “Ropey Art”. But only in the sense of stream of consciousness, you actually don’t notice the art as the writing is queasy and pulpy and well sort of biggly strange.

The collection is loosely managed by a goth vampire-adjacent queen called The Baroness and her friend The Henchman, as they introduce you to four discreet anecdotes, with all sorts of knowing street culture and stories within stories, unravelling in hallucinogenic ways.

The artwork; pulpy, the stories; pulpy, the overall effect: a lot of fun. I mean if you are going to create something that is in the shadow of Bryan Talbot, some-time dad of Rob, and all round British Institution, you may as well lean into the difference and not the same-itude. Talbot Jnr. achieves that with aplomb and makes a truly fun comic-adjacent experience for “immature readers” – as the cover states.

Top-n-tailed with old comic adverts (inside cover and back page) and a colour cover full of dead characters from ‘big name comics’, this piece of work is for anyone who has an interest in why Deadpool Disney [OMG] is funny, and She Hulk Disney [OMG] is just plain bad on all counts of a Powerpoint graphing slide left in default colours. This is the exact intersect; it is knowing, and with that, when all said and done… GraveWorms is a triumph. Bring on Issue 2 – assuming the numbers go up of course [side eye].

Graham Baines

• Grab a copy of Rob Talbot’s GraveWorms here on eBay

• GraveWorms Official Site (Under Construction)

• Follow Ron Talbot on Facebook