Issue #2 of Decay arrived on our doorstep blood red and dripping, ensuring an instant read and something of a fight over who was going to review. Editor Koziol, who seems total unrepentant after the first issue that put the “delinquent” into Juvenile according to the moral majority, this time delivers four gore laden stories that will have your heart pumping. Additionally you get a couple of features, an editorial, and a whole bunch more in a jammed packed Issue that solves your immediate reading concerns. Lets get right into the mash.

Ever woken up with only hazy recollections of what you did the night before? A few too many beers, a vague recollection of someone wanting to play 'Friday the 13th” in the woods behind the house the previous evening, no idea of how you got to bed or at what time? Which is all fine until you find a bloody machete on your kitchen table and a lack of noise in the house. That open kitchen door is suddenly looking ominous, and you just know coffee isn't going to cut it. I had a flashback to the games we play recently when the Parental units dropped in to the crib for one of their regular “check the disaster” visits. The blood stained elephant in the room was a copy of Decay #2 that sat on the coffee table, uncommented on, but drawing concerned glances. Okay the excellent cover by James Fosdike might have featured a chick with an axe holding a severed head, but like it was hardly a blood stained machete right? One of the dangers of reviewing for a Site like ScaryMinds is your reading material isn't going to impress the church going members of your family, but heck at least they haven't seen what's in the woods out back! My point here folks is that Decay is not the magazine for everyone, and if still under your parents' roof then get ready for late night reads, under the covers, with a flashlight. You either dig your horror bloodstained and making a point or you don't, there is no middle ground.

I had a glance, okay a solid read over a couple of days, at the first Issue of Decay and like put my hand up immediately for the chance to fire up the word processor to review Issue #2. In one of those “be careful what you wish for” moments, the magazine was flung in my direction and here I am procrastinating over talking about it. When you have something this good you kind of have to sneak up on the review, take it from a different angle, start writing before your brain realises you are hitting the keys.

Issue #2 of any magazine is nearly always an important release as your readership are getting into your groove and working out what's going down with the publication. Editor Darren Koziol doesn't disappoint here, the regular features we all wanted are going down like a slasher victim, and there's enough new gravy on the biscuit to have us rocking on.

I'm kind of intrigued by Oz Zombie, as stated in the previous Issue review, a Downunder take on the whole Walking Dead vibe. That could be just me, but I'm on the Romero groove train with the zombie thing, they shuffle they don't run, shoot them in the head. I was doing the snoopy dance when I found the story is going to feature in each Issue. In Issue #2 we follow the action directly after events in the first instalment, with Dan and Sally, two Aussie kids doing the best they can, finding an out of the way town is infested with the undead zombie hordes. We're still not getting the complete background of whether the apocalypse has gone done, or why, survival would be the chief motivator at this stage. OzZombie is turning into a must read, lock and load on this excellent story people, it's going to be the sort of rough ride we all dig.

What I was particular pleased to see in Issue #2 was the return of the SCAR team, S. Carter and Antoinette Rydyr, with another of their trademark retro Sci-Fi/Horror hybrids. Amazulu is amazingly heavily drawn, with a lot of detail in each panel, and involves the sort of script you would expect to find in one of those pulp fiction digests that spun out of the good old U.S of A in an an avalanche of geek Nirvana. SCAR captures a bygone look and feel to perfection, Decay can keep this stuff coming at me all night long, I'm in my space with it.

Along with the two regular stories we get a couple of additional one shots that will keep you rock and rolling along. House of Horror showcases just what a sick individual writer Darren Koziol is, and highlights a clear and present danger to society. You all might claim it's entertaining with the final panels being backwoods homely, but I'm here to tell you now that the Westboro Baptist church aren't going to do Sunday readings from the comic. Assuming the Baptists haven't all disappeared with the recent rapture and all, fingers crossed there, they actually don't know what they are missing. David Heinrich, who clearly spends too much time on the computer for his own good, delivers a wallop across the back of your head with the excellent Deresolution Day, that has more twists than a Swiss army knife.

I have to say that's an awful lot of reading for your eight dollars folks. But just when you think you can't possibly get more bangs for your buck Issue #2 delivers a few features to make a happy camper out of all of us. Marc Herzen presents The Mean Streets of Adelaide Tour, an overview of a free walk for visitors to Adelaide, Australia, that doesn't appear in any of the literature the Tourist Board of South Australia publishes. Was digging on the article photos. Steve Colloff shows how to take a photograph and make a comic panel from it, in similar fashion to the ScaryMinds' house, that was originally a New Yorkers' photo of a creepy place in Melbourne, Australia. And finally we get a pictorial of the launch of Decay magazine, all the best people, both living and dead, were there apparently. Strangely our own Editor didn't get an invite.

There's a bunch more features to keep you happy, but no room here to list them. Just have to say Splatt The Zombie Cat is wacky good fun.

While Decay is not stocked at my local Comic Hangout, they can tell me the magazine is in pretty much all good Australia comic stores, so we might just start to see an Issue or two turning up outside Downunder. You can order Issues online for $8 AUD a copy, plus P&H, use the “Contact Us” link on the website Dark Decay Central. Recommended magazine folks, remember you heard about it here first.