Max is in a pool in the mall. There are ducks swimming around him. Only thing is: the ducks were taken out of that pool back in 1995. Max might not know that. He’s probably unaware that the mall itself has a few secrets tucked away in its heart. This is no simple abandoned shopping mall. This is Dead Mall #2. Writer Adam Cesare continues his excavation into weird retail horror with artist David Stoll. The horror of a dead shopping mall holds a hell of a lot of potential. Cesare and Stoll are still only scratching away at the surface of the potential in a very promising second issue.

Two of the trapped teens are on an escalator in darkness. They’ve been there for kind of a long time without apparently actually going anywhere. One of them thinks it might be a good idea to try to climb over the side. (They’d already tried going up and down...no luck.) When he’s gone, the mall offers the girl he was with a free makeover in a Sephora-like shop called “Beaux.” She recognizes a shade of lipstick that’s discontinued, which is a bit odd, but there are so many identical specters who are just dying to make her over...

Cesare is focusing the narrative quite tightly on the teens who are trapped in the sentient abandoned shopping mall. This allows the reader to get emotionally invested in them. It also veers pretty far away from the thematic potential of the haunted corpse of a shopping mall. Some of the satirical horror potential is met in the narration, which apparently acts as the internal monologue of the mall itself as it plays with the teens who had crept in last issue to sneak around. The high schoolers ARE interesting people, so the overall momentum of the series continues to work in its second issue. 

Stoll’s art features some remarkably crisp line work that allows for his colors to resonate vividly on the page. The rendering on the detail can get pretty intricate where it needs to in order to amplify effects like shattered glass and bone protruding from skin, but it all feels so slick that one can practically smell the surface cleaner and the Cinnabon in some distant, phantom food court. It’s all so clean and happy, but there ARE quite a few moments that fuse the cuteness of the mall with something darker. The glowing eyes of the specters in the background of the cosmetics shop are particularly clever fusions between the cute and the horrifying.

Dead Mall is moving at a deliciously slow pace that could easily stretch out for a delightfully agonizing few dozen issues. Cesare and Stoll wouldn’t even have to add any characters to the ensemble. The dynamic between the conflict and the characters clearly draws a lot of inspiration from cheesy horror films, but a series like this could remain quite entertaining even if it ran the same plot out much longer than the traditional three-act Hollywood plot structure. It’s a shopping mall. There are SO many themes that could be covered in the course of the series. 

Grade: B+