Europe has always been a hot destination for high-quality comic creators, from France to Spain having plenty of works that although untranslated, are worth checking out purely for the masterful artwork. Maria Llovet is one of these such creators, having made plenty of comics that are yet untranslated, and also collaborated with American Comics veteran Brian Azzarello. Her most recently translated work, “Heartbeat”, has been brought over by Boom! and looks to bring some of her natural European cool over to our side of the world.
Written, illustrated and colored by Maria Llovet
Lettering by Andworld Design
Translated by Andrea RosenbergEva, a high school outcast, finds herself witness to a horrible secret: the most popular boy in school enjoys the taste of blood and will kill to get his hands on it. Horrified and intrigued, Eva lets herself be pulled into Donatien’s macabre world. He offers the escape she has been looking for…but how much is Eva willing to betray her moral code in order to find something that gives her life meaning? And will she—or Donatien—ever find redemption? Maria Llovet (Faithless) presents a dark, violent, decadent, disturbing story, in which life and death, blood and love, are inextricably intertwined.
Llovet hooks us in with her protagonist superbly by slowly revealing what drives her and details about her past. We don’t get much about Eva at the beginning of this comic, but she’s already compelling based just on the way she navigates the world and relates to those around her. In this way, Llovet tactfully uses dialogue as a storytelling device, ensuring that nothing said doesn’t contribute to the narrative. Before we learn that Eva’s mother is an underpaid nurse struggling to give her daughter a worthy education, we see Eva approach her lying on the couch, saying “Mom… Mom, you haven’t signed the scholarship forms”. We also get a lot of Eva’s naivete and her poor status during her interactions with other students in the school, like with what appears to be the gatekeeper telling her “Coming in through the service door! Family must be-“. We get more context later onto her actions, which is great especially when she reveals her bitter and vengeful side through a Facebook post, but what we get in these opening scenes is rich with character development.
The way that the school and the plot twist are set up are cleverly done structurally. The setting from the outset is already positioned as an outsider culture due to the fact that it’s hidden, and has a number of confidently weird characters like Mack and Amber residing in it, so we never really suspect anything more because it feels like the twist has already happened. Llovet doesn’t completely ignore building tension throughout, however: we see the mysterious Donatien float around the campus from scene to scene. Llovet even includes something of a red herring as we see Donatien in a page long sequence pick up a seemingly dying bird and start to tend to it. His appearance is peppered throughout the issue, mostly in tiny flashbacks from Eva, so when we see him actually committing his bloodthirsty act, it feels shocking and readers can feel the tension right along with Eva as she snaps a picture on her flip phone (which is cool, you just don’t get it).
Llovet has a super clean, manga-esque style in this series and it works for the high school aesthetic and ups the cool factor considerably. I love how well she acts out Eva throughout the series as it makes her a much more complex character through visual intricacies. She starts off as a very blasé, which does a lot of telling for her character and setting considering as she looks around while putting on her eye patch, there are bottles of spilled pills and unfortunate living circumstances. However, Llovet cleverly makes her more nervous as she approaches the school, signifying that this is a place of fear or that she at least has had bad experiences with. She retains this look for a while, mixing it with desire whenever she looks at Donatien or curiosity when watching some of the stranger students. It’s not until she gets home that we see Eva drop her guard somewhat, with Llovet giving her more obvious tired lines and looking a little more relaxed in her body language.
Continued belowThe school and the settings around Eva have a lot of life breathed into them, due to a number of different reasons. When Eva first walks to school through the city, the urban area surrounding her is filled with power lines and pharmaceutical stores, suggesting already that everything may not be what it seems. The entrance to the school is also a high point as it marks a visual departure from modern school trappings to something more medieval and renaissance-influenced, with the use of wood and tile furnishings, lots of cracked pottery and old trinkets. Jumping forward somewhat, Llovet does some really neat lettering sound effects that carry a lot of storytelling. When the schoolgirls are picking on Eva, we see bright pink, fake-looking HA HA HA which suggests the idea that these other girls might just be laughing to fit in and not be alienated. The best use of this lettering design is when Eva accidentally takes a photo of Donatien in his bloody act, giving us a BE~EP sound effect that perfectly captures how loud the camera sound can seem when you don’t mean for it to be turned on.
Llovet uses some nice, flat coloring to give this book a washed-out, retro feel throughout. This is most apparent in the school sections, which makes the times when Eva is at home or on the street feel brilliantly contrasted. Eva’s home is dominated by navy blues and darker colors that suggest more melancholy than terror, whilst the city outside the school is filled with dry, sterile browns that make it feel all-too modern somehow. The school has an old-school vibrant color palette interestingly, it’s just that the diverse colors have been desaturated significantly to give it more of a European boarding school look. There’s also some great use of shadowing when Mack and Amber are discussing more taboo subjects that they don’t want Eva to hear, almost silhouetting them but leaving them partially visible almost to suggest they know what they could be easily exposed as doing something wrong.
Few comic creators can deliver an effortlessly cool and harrowing series debut like Llovet can in ”Heartbeat”. The characters are interesting and developed cleanly, the setting is a little on the nose but serves its purpose in the story well, and the art is stylish, simple in being a nice blend of eastern and western elements. This is worth looking into.
Final Score: 8.9 – A comics debut that handles storytelling and visual style superbly, ”Heartbeat” is a gripping tale.
