“Heathentown” was published in 2011, and – as noobish as this is going to sound – I wasn’t really reading comics then. So, this one-shot – this gloriously weird and terrifying one-shot, brought to roaring life by Shadowline – entirely escaped my notice. Some things are just meant to be, though, and after having it recommended a few times, I couldn’t turn down this 98-page journey into darkness. Seriously, I know a lot of comics promise memorable, soul-rotting horror, but this one really delivers, carving out a niche in the corner of your unconscious and staying there.
Written by Corinna Bechko
Illustrated by Gabriel HardmanWhen Anna travels deep within the Florida Everglades to attend her lover’s funeral, she finds herself in an eerie small town where death is but a horrible beginning! In an attempt to discover the truth, she digs up her lover’s coffin, starting a chain reaction which brings an ancient malevolence into the town – bent on her destruction!
Now that I think of it, I picked up “Deep Gravity” about this time last year – and while I found it solid, it didn’t impress me overly. It’s safe to say, then, that I was unprepared for the eerie goodness that is this earlier work from Corinna Bechko and Gabriel Hardman. Unfolding with the logic of a nightmare, and at a lightning-fast pace, “Heathentown” drags us away from a world that makes sense – most of the time, anyway – to a hellscape that gets weirder and darker the further we go. The turns and twists are as unexpected as a woolly mammoth in the Everglades, and hit just as hard.
We’re on mostly familiar footing at the beginning; Anna, taken into the police station after being caught digging up a grave, has to explain to her public defender just what the heck is going on. It’s what she tells him that gives us our first window into the very unusual things she’s encountered that night – and just when it seems like matters are about to take a prosaic route, they get more complicated.
All the while, Hardman’s stark, harshly-rendered art makes the most of shadowy forest and fluorescent-lit office alike. High-contrast black and white art is extremely difficult to do well – at its worst, the eyes slide right over it, smarting too hard to pick up the sense of the scene. Hardman’s masterly textures, however, keep every panel and page not only comprehensible, but compulsive, strung together in effortless layouts and moving the story forward at an ever-quickening pace.
The scene-setting, too, is remarkable – in the forest especially. You can practically hear the twigs snapping underfoot. The nighttime lighting is pulled off perfectly, revealing just enough detail – shaggy trees, ripples in a pond – to make us even more afraid of what we’re not seeing. This sense of economy makes the first, revelatory double page spread all the more chilling; we’re finally seeing something head-on and close-up that we know, we know, should not be there.
Interestingly, Anna doesn’t ingratiate herself too early. In addition to her initial dialogue, her posing and expressions are just emotionally distant enough to draw us in – and as the traumatic nature of the things she’s seen comes to light, her stoicism adds to the unsettling atmosphere. As for the less, um, human things that Anna encounters, here Hardman’s grasp on texture goes hog wild, crafting beings that bristle and crackle with every step.
Enriching it all is a delightful sense of oddity, of novelty, of being just a bit too out of this world for anybody to have thought of in the first place. In this sense – as well as in its expressionistic sensibilities – “Heathentown” bears comparison with my favourite horror movie, 1962’s Carnival of Souls. The recommendation goes both ways; if you’ve ever seen that rare, pre-Lynchean, excursion into the odd – and loved it – chances are you’ll see that same spirit in “Heathentown”. It probably goes without saying, while we’re making comparisons, that this also feels like a distant cousin of “Black Hole” – it’s haunted by that same sense of constant, impending doom.
Let’s not forget the supplementary materials at the back. There are newspaper clippings, an old postcard, even an illustration of a molting alligator, and these expand on the mythology of the story without saying too much. There are definitely some unanswered questions at the end of this tale, but my feeling is that any pause for exposition would have ruined the unique atmosphere. Besides, mulling over just what was going on with Anna is a lot of more scary than knowing.
All that really remains to be said is that, so far as unexpected, underrated, available-for-extraordinarily-cheap-online one-shots go, “Heathentown” comes highly recommended – and deeply feared. And I can’t think of a more suitable read for a sticky summer’s night.
