With “Mayday”, Curt Pires teams with Chris Peterson to continue a trilogy that started in “POP” and that looks at how we experience and celebrate media by taking a trip in more ways than one into the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles and the horrors found there.
Check out our spoiler free of “Mayday” #1 below to find out why you should not miss this upcoming release from Black Mask Studios.
Written by Curt Pires
Illustrated by Chris Peterson
A washed-up, drug-addicted screenwriter and a transgender bartender stumble onto a Satanic cult’s plan to sacrifice people all across LA (geomapped in the form of a pentagram, of course) and bring on armageddon. As our intrepid, damaged heroes embark on a suicide mission to stop the crazy cultists, even they wonder if this is all really happening or if they’re just plain batshit crazy. Probably both.The latest project from the mind of white hot scribe Curt Pires (POP) sees him teaming with art sensation Chris Peterson (Grindhouse) for a story that cuts to the very center of Hollywood mythology and depravity itself.
Los Angeles isn’t a city, it’s more like a monster. A collection of buildings, streets, bricks, mortar and concrete brought to life by the vices of its inhabitants. It chews up everyone who goes there and, if they’re lucky, spits them out to recover and live quietly in some, less monstrous state. There have been more than a few artists throughout history to explore the eerie, otherworldly nature of that strange city. Lost Highway, Boogie Nights, Starlet, Chinatown; stories that speak to the heartbeat of a city that feeds on corrupting innocence. But for all that, it’s a subject rarely explored in comics. There have been a few, sure, but now it’s time for Curt Pires and Chris Peterson to spin their tale of debauchery in the city of angels with “Mayday”.
A strange quality about “Mayday” #1 is that the solicit actually tells you more about the comic than the comic itself does. However, this is not a complaint as it is emblematic of writer Curt Pires’ tendency to zero in on the characters of his stories and let the story play out around them. Pires is a writer who has recently seen a rather meteoric rise on the backs of the excellent “Theremin” and “POP”, the latter of which shares much of its DNA with “Mayday”. Both are stories with larger than life, rather heady high concepts that seem to blur like the out of focus background in a close up with a telephoto lens. That’s not to say the story isn’t important, but that Pires allows the events of the story to play out around the characters while keeping the focus solely on said characters. This is definitely apparent in “Mayday” as, looking at the solicit I can definitely say those things did happen, but that they weren’t the focal point of the issue.
What, then, was the focal point of the issue? Well, in keeping with the extended film metaphor going on here, this issue was the establishing shot. Introducing us to both Terrence Gattica, an award winning screenwriter who flushed his acclaim and money down the drain, and Kleio, a mysterious bartender unwittingly wrapped into the whole affair, Pires does an excellent job of establishing tone and character in this issue, giving you everything you need to know about the series in 30 pages. This is, after all, the kind of series that will be loved by some, but won’t be everyone’s cup of tea and Pires and Peterson are not shy about letting you know that. However, for anyone that’s a fan of things like Mulholland Drive or Californication, this is for you. Pires’ writing completely encapsulates the intoxicating atmosphere of LA as the first issue follows Gattica on a bad day of almost Tarantino levels with a handful of Coen Brothers-esque situational black comedy.
It’s also, as you can imagine, a comic for anyone with a love for film.
However, this isn’t one of this comics that tries to trick you into thinking it’s a film. Chris Peterson embraces the comic book nature wholeheartedly, mixing small storytelling quirks that only really exist in comics like insert panels on close-ups as a way of stopping time and drawing the reader’s eye to a moment with a large climactic set piece of two fifteen panel pages of an intense action scene. His art evokes the almost hallucinogenic atmosphere of the city, alternating each scene between rough, scattershot panels as Gattica trips balls and clean and sterile grids as the inevitable comedown rears its head. This is all punctuated by a sequence that evokes something between a harsh, almost found footage horror film vibe and the dreamlike cinematography of a Lynch film that culminates in an unsettling undercurrent to the comic as a whole.
Continued belowPeterson’s art is then enhanced by the colours by Pete Toms who harnesses a vibrant, almost neon colour palette. The effect creates a larger than life feel to the artwork, even in those scenes on the comedown where reality seems to creep in at the edges Toms keeps that hallucinogenic feel to the world of “Mayday” with a bright, saturated palette that only ever feels at home in the place in the pages of a comic book. It’s a level of unreality that enhances both the art and the writing outside a rigid sense of place or time and creates what can only be described as a comic book-y effect. While both the writing and the artwork can be described using comparisons to certain films and genres, the colour work on “Mayday” is something that really separates the book from films and entrenches it in the world of comics. It’s the finish that the book needed lest it become a comic wishing it was film, instead it’s a comic using the language of film to talk how we celebrate and experience media as a whole. The celebrates, it turns out, usually involves a lot of drugs.
Black Mask Studios is a publisher making a name for themselves on rather niche books that take a brutal and unflinching look at our world through the medium of comics and with “Mayday”, they have another notch on their belt. Curt Pires continues to be a very interesting, very unique writer in comics as eschews large, plot-driven narratives for smaller, character-driven pieces that focus on the underbelly of society people rarely like to think about. “Mayday” is precisely that kind of comic book and with Chris Peterson and Pete Toms, the book is a gorgeous acid trip through the ass end of Hollywood revealing the grit and grime underneath the neon signs and spotlights.
“Mayday” #1 will be published to all good comic book stores on March 25, for anyone that loves films, especially of the kind mentioned repeatedly throughout this review, this is a comic that must not be missed.
Final Verdict: 9.0 – The only thing missing from this title is an ambient synth score. Seriously, don’t miss out on this.
