Reviews from the Bargain Bin: The Blair Witch Project #1 (Oni Press, 1999) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

OK, well, for one thing - it’s really hard to see all those black-on-black handprints on the physical cover. I didn’t notice them until I scanned it in, and then did a double take opening the file. Spooky!

Often, movie-themed comic book one-shot tie-ins are hasty, rushed marketing ploys. The Blair Witch Project defies its predecessors with a pitch perfect mythos-building collection of stories that use the comic book medium to advance the Blair Witch franchise in ways that the found-footage movies cannot. 

There are three stories here, illustrated in black and white by different artists, all written by Jen Van Meter (Hopeless Savages). Meter has masters degree in Folklore, and it shows; she fluidly moves through three different periods of history with apt Weird tales for each. Additionally, there is an element of meta-fiction: Meter purports to have adapted her stories from a 1983 self-published graphic novel, Wood Witch Said, which features the delusional, horrific ravings of a former student at John’s Hopkins, who may or may not have survived an ordeal with the Blair Witch. 

In the same way that the film elevated its allure with an element of hoax, so too does this book; while that could have been cheesy and boring, the scripts are restrained, fluid, and each artist is perfectly suited for their assignments. 

I first read this one back in ‘99, on the rack at Comics Kingdom in Baltimore (which is now a Vape shop), and I haven’t seen it again until it appeared in the bargain bin. I was 10, and the Guy Davis story, at its climax (see above), shocked my young mind in a new and visceral way; I never forgot how that panel made me feel. The comic haunted me for years in a way that the movie failed to do. At summer camp, we went camping in the woods where the stories take place; I retold them to my friends as only known historical information about the real Blair Witch. Good times. 

“Elly Kedward’s Curse” is illustrated by Tommy Lee Edwards. An atmospheric and sweeping tale of one cursed woman’s experience in a post-revolutionary township overtaken by American religious fervor. I think the title character’s name is a play on the name of necromancer Edward Kelly? 

“She Needs Me: Coffin Rock” is illustrated by Guy Davis. It’s my favorite story in the book, easily. In antebellum Burkittsville, a young girl loses herself in the cursed woods, guided by a voice that gives her increasingly malicious advice. Things goes poorly for a search party that seeks to rescue her. 

“Left Alone: The Rustin Parr Killings” is illustrated by Bernie Mireault (BEM). The illustrator’s playful cartoon art contrasts with the extremely dark subject material: a contemporary tale of an isolated man who begins abducting and ritually murdering children (at the behest, of course, of the whispering Witch). It’s gruesome, unsettling, and beautifully rendered. 

The book concludes with “selections” from the cryptofictional Wood Witch Said, and the inside back cover features annotations by Meter to provide additional “historical” information about the text adaptions, and to help support the hoaxing going on. There is a lot packed into this one little floppy; I highly recommend it to any fan of horror comics.

The glow of four vertical monitors cast a cold, indigo sheen across Marcus’s collarbone, illuminating the deep shadows beneath his eyes. Two years ago, he had been on the other side of the glass—a high-frequency trader at Aetheris Capital, watching numbers turn into millions until the firm’s executives executed a pre-planned rug pull. They liquidated ninety-eight percent of the liquidity pool overnight, dumping worthless tokens onto retail investors, pocketing three hundred million dollars, and blaming a fictitious smart contract exploit. Marcus had lost everything: his savings, his career, and his reputation as he took the fall.

They thought the blockchain was an immutable vault. Marcus knew it was just a ledger of arrogance, waiting for someone with the right cryptographic key to balance the scales.

Deep within the decentralized architecture of the Ethereum network, Marcus had spent eighteen months weaving Phantom-7, an offensive zero-day payload disguised as a routine validator node patch. It didn't just breach private keys; it manipulated the consensus protocol at the memory level, forcing nodes to execute unauthorized state overrides without altering the public transaction history until the block was finalized.

Tonight, his target was Julian Vance, the former CEO of Aetheris Capital, currently sitting in a penthouse overlooking the Dubai marina. Vance was about to launch his second "decentralized ecosystem"—another setup designed to siphon millions from unsuspecting buyers.

Marcus brought up Vance’s cold-storage multisig wallet. The screen flickered green with live telemetry: $84,200,000 USD held in wrapped Bitcoin and stablecoins.

With a measured rhythm, Marcus initiated the attack. His fingers flew across the mechanical keyboard, deploying three malicious transactions into the mempool. The first transaction flooded the network with high-gas phantom transfers, clogging the target block and isolating Vance’s primary multi-signature node. The second injected a recursive reentrancy exploit directly into the vault’s withdrawal function.

Across the globe, in a dimly lit VIP lounge, Vance’s hardware wallet buzzed violently. Panic set in as Vance checked his phone, watching the emergency alerts trigger. He frantically mashed the freeze command on his administrative dashboard, attempting to lock down his funds.

That was precisely what Marcus was waiting for.

Vance’s administrative override key was the payload’s Trojan horse. The second Vance signed the freeze order with his private key, Marcus’s script captured the signatures from the local memory buffer, reconstructed the master seed, and broadcasted the third transaction.

Instead of locking the vault, the smart contract executed a complete wallet drain.

On Marcus's central display, the numbers began to tick down with blinding speed. 84 Million... 40 Million... 10 Million... Zero.

The funds didn't land in Marcus’s personal account. Instead, the smart contract executed fifty thousand automated micropayments, routing every single cent back to the verified wallet addresses of the original victims from the Aetheris collapse—dollar for dollar, adjusted for inflation.

A solitary alert flashed on Vance’s phone: Transaction Confirmed. Block #19842011. Balance: 0.00 ETH.

Marcus leaned back in his worn leather chair, taking a slow sip of black coffee as the final script wiped his local logs and scattered his IP address through forty encrypted proxy relays. On the monitor, a single command prompt remained open, leaving a final, immutable message encoded into the transaction’s input data field for the entire public chain to see:

The ledger always balances.

Mothman