When Frank, a rebellious young man, disrupts the lives of Julie, Joey, and Susie, they will create violent mayhem the likes of which the world has rarely seen.
Cover by Ivan TaoWritten by Nadia Shammas
Illustrated by Dillon Snook
Colored by Emilio Lecce
Lettered by AndWorld Design’s JAMEIt is 1994 and the secluded and sleepy town of Ormond is home to some restless teens. A rebellious teen in foster care, Frank Morrison is on the verge of breaking free and taking his destiny into his own hands. However, how he does it may just cause bloody destruction to be left in his path.
As Frank is taken in by a new foster father in Ormond, he can already tell that the man does not care about him and is essentially only looking to have someone he can control. Feeling the weight of this, and his already rebellious spirit getting to him, Frank decides to sneak out and check out his new surroundings. Through a few moments of happenstance he meets Julie who is sitting on a bench sketching, they get to talking, and in turn she introduces Frank to Joey and Susie at a little house party. As the foursome begin to hit it off as the night progresses, Frank shares more about himself and his time bouncing around through the foster system. As the conversation heightens, anger, frustration, and all sorts of other typical teen feelings come pouring out and the gang decide to stir up some trouble.
Issue one is all set for character development and how these tiny circumstantial events will create the world as seen in 2016’s (and as it spread to other consoles: 2017, 2019, 2020) hit horror game Dead By Daylight. How will these teens and their seemingly inconsequential story in their tiny corner of the world lead to The Entity is quite unclear, but it is an intriguing concept to see how something so insignificant could lead it it, if nothing else. As it sits right now with just one issue out, this story is not unlike hundreds, or even thousands, that have come before. Writer Nadia Shammas unfortunately gives us nothing new to really latch onto aside from a few little nods that are clearly kernels of ideas, concepts, and designs from the original game. And while there is absolutely nothing wrong with this set up, or how things are playing thus far, it just isn’t terribly interesting outside of how A gets to Z, but when it comes to prequels you have to have more than that, even from the jumping off point. The dialogue is all simple and fairly uninteresting. I wanted to feel as angry and excited as these teens feel. As the reader you should be invested in what the main characters are doing, whether you fully align with their point of view, or even like them as people. You need to still have a connection with them to be on this journey of discovery. Because of the format and nature of the game, there is a pretty decent blank canvas for story expansion, but this takes things in directions that never reach for anything special.
As a prequel to a very popular game, it would probably not be out of the question that the art and design of this comic would be something that would have had a lot of time and immense talent devoted to it, but outside of the various covers for each issue, there is essentially nothing about the art of this book that relates in anyway to the compelling, and sometimes, impeccable art and design of the game. Dillon Snook’s illustrations are not terrible or bad, there are plenty of great comics that have a similar style, but this just does not fit into this world. The sketchy, blocky work does have an air of amateurish style that feels more cute and simply does not fit in this world or convey what has come before or how this should be a part of that. The same can be said for Emilio Lecce’s colors. Everything about it looks good and passable, but there’s no risk taken. All of the art just sits there to get you from page to page with no excitement.
Continued belowAs for attempting to appeal to fans and non-fans alike, they are successful in that regard. The details that are interesting are thus for pure storytelling reasons and have no real bearing on whether or not you’ve played the game. Nothing about this is cheap fan service, so for that it gets some praise. If this miniseries manages to do something really fascinating and stick its landing, I could absolutely see it attracting newcomers to try out the game as well.
Maybe it’s because this is a video game tie-in that Titan didn’t want to dump a certain amount or kind of talent or spend too much time developing this into a worthwhile opener, but as it stands now, “Dead By Daylight” has started its backstory in an uninspired fashion. With nearly nothing about it feeling like the existing universe, all we get is a stereotypical angsty night out with a group of teens whose character and personality disappears as soon as you’re done reading.
Final Verdict: 4.0, “Dead By Daylight” #1 is generally bland start to a prequel that should have had fans of horror and the original game drooling from excitement, not boredom.
