“Kill Your Darlings” #1

The world of imagination is a fascinating one, especially if you’re a child. You create entire worlds filled with fantastic characters and you do amazing things. You can be a king, a warrior, or even a god and it’s truly a magical time.

The sad thing is that it all winds up changing as you get older. For some people, the world fades away and turns into the depressing real world of bills, obligations, and life. For others (like me) you try to recapture it but twist it into an attempt to never escape and try to make money off it (this is usually done under the banner of “becoming a writer”) and for a very rare and tragic few, fantasy bleeds into reality with terrifying and tragic consequences.

Is that what happens in today’s comic “Kill Your Darlings” #1? Let’s see if we can find out.

Cover by: Bob Quinn

Written by Ethan S. Parker and Griffin Sheridan
Illustrated by John J. Hill and Bob Quinn

SERIES PREMIERE
Eight-year-old Rose loves nothing more than to play pretend in a magical land of her own creation. To her, that world is as real as our own, from her fluffy friends to the terrible evil that lurks at the center of it all. In one night, the line between fantasy and reality will disappear, an ancient hunger will feed again, and Rose will be pulled into a gruesome saga that began centuries before her birth.

A new epic begins from debut writers ETHAN S. PARKER and GRIFFIN SHERIDAN, and superstar art team BOB QUINN (Knights of X) and JOHN J. HILL (VANISH)!

“Kill Your Darlings” #1 is a book about Rose, a girl with a very active imagination and who is the queen/general of an army of stuffed animals. She leads her army against the forces of the creepy ones–another group of stuffed animals–as they wage war across her bedroom. Sadly, Rose’s real world life isn’t as grand or as epic. Unfortunately, her mom is having trouble with the bills and there seems to have been some trouble in the past that has to do with a young girl being burned at the stake for being a witch over 300 years ago.

Tragically, it seems that all three of these events have collided together in a single, terrible night that sees Rose’s life turned upside down and her carefully crafted fantasy realm torn apart in a single moment of blood and terror. What’s going on? Who’s responsible? Why is this happening to her?

Nobody knows.

“Kill Your Darlings” #1 is written by Ethan S. Parker and Griffin Sheridan and it’s clear from the third page that they understand how a child’s mind works. The comic shows Rose growing up as a lonely child, and her fantasy realm is a place of refuge where she can escape from all the bad things that are happening around her and have some measure of control over what’s going on in her life. She always makes the right decisions and everything winds up okay in the end. It’s a rather tragic contrast to what’s going on in the real world, where a single mom is struggling with bills and trying to raise her daughter while keeping a full time job. It all comes to a head in a brutal and ugly moment where Rose discovers that a great evil has invaded her land, her house burns down, and she can’t find her mom. Even in the midst of this horrific tragedy, Parker and Griffin do a great job of keeping the event shrouded in mystery. Yes, there are hints that the fire could have been caused by external factors such as still burning cigarettes or a lamp that was left on for too long, but there are darker and more sinister ideas afoot that may just be Rose’s mind coping with the tragedy, or something else going on. All in all, it’s a solid first issue that does a great job of leaving the reader wanting to learn more.

If “Kill Your Darlings” #1 has any issues, it’s at the very beginning of the book. The story opens with a girl being burned at the stake in the 1600’s and it’s never addressed again. Yes, the previews blurb hints that these two stories are linked despite being 300 years apart, but there’s very little set up or explanation in the rest of the book that explains why. Granted, it will probably come to light in future issues, but it’s the single biggest storytelling flaw in an otherwise great book.

The artwork for “Kill Your Darlings” #1 is provided by John Hill and Bob Quinn, and it is a great example of how to use art and color to enhance the story. The overall style of the story is reminiscent of a cell shaded, anime inspired children’s book that gives all the characters wide faces with minimalist features, which allows them to be incredibly expressive. The style has a soft and gentle feeling that makes things feel light and dreamy, which makes it all the more jarring when it comes to the scenes of incredible violence, and yes there is a lot of blood and some genuinely disturbing moments at the end of the story. But the best feature of the book is its use of color. Hill and Quinn do a great job of making the fantasy world look bright and relatively cheerful while the real world looks dark and depressing. It’s an art style that does a great job of threading the gap between childhood innocence and something more sinister lurking behind the scenes.

“Kill Your Darlings” #1 is an intriguing first issue that captures the spirit of childhood imagination in all its glory and terror. It’s fun, whimsical, and filled with imagination while dealing with some heavy and scary stuff. It all comes to a head at the end with some legitimately disturbing moments and creates a mystery that will leave you wanting to come back just to find out what happens next.

Final Verdict: 8.7- This is a book about childhood that is not for kids, and outside of a weird opening scene that doesn’t appear to go anywhere, it presents a great mystery and some answers that jump between the mundane and the legitimately creepy.