A wonderfully engaging and enjoyable horror comic delivered with a light touch. Logan Ibarra and Abraham Lorhel are repair staff called out to a laboratory where they quickly discover that something very bad has happened. After Logan is knocked out and when he revives finds that he is with the few survivors from the recent events including Clement Varker, the CEO of the company who has undergone a serious transformation. As the group try to navigate a way out of the building and encounter a selection of monsters along the way, the background to the events is slowly revealed.
Tessa Stone takes a classic horror set up, a group of strangers trapped in a building struggling with each other and trying to survive and escape and has give it a thorough overhaul.The group are not strangers to each other, except for Logan, they do have a a nice dose of conflicts among themselves. The context is superb, a building full of horrifyingly transformed people who have retained their characters while having their physical being twisted in astonishing ways.This means that the monsters are not stupid nor careless, they are still are fully aware of their circumstances are are actively trying to control the, Exactly the same as the group of survivors which makes the struggle considerably more interesting as they are fighting with their minds as much as with nail boards, the nail boards do come in very handy at times.
The cast are full of energy, determined to survive or succeed, they demand the reader’s attention as they try to impose some control on their circumstances. No is simply fodder, every is going to go down fighting to the end. As much as those who have been transformed are find themselves so the survivors are discovering themselves under the pressure of the fight. The cast a nicely developing and growing across the story as they respond to the circumstances. The cast is nicely and naturally diverse.
The art is stunning, it is wonderfully confident from the great array of different transformations to the tremendous expressiveness of all the cast human and monster. Each of the cast are very individual. The action scenes are violent and gory, suspense is carefully generated across pages as the cast respond to looming threats. In particular the management and control of the panels is outstanding, they are confidently used to expand and contract the focus of the story exactly as they should to serve the content.
The colouring is at the same standard, it brings out and emphasizes the story nuances and beats with considerable subtlety while being loud and vivid at the same time. The lettering is easy to read and never calls attention to itself, the sound effects on the other hand are gloriously loud and intrusive, they add greatly to pleasure the story.
Tessa Stone has created a superb comic that exploits the possibilities of the medium to really capture and engage the reader.
