The best and brightest suddenly find themselves in the harshest and wildest section of South America. Lost and forgotten, they’ll have to rely on their wits to get back home — except everything they know won’t help them in this situation. Will they be able to survive in unfriendly territory, or will we check out and wish them dead by the end of this series?
Written by Alex De Campi
Illustrated by Carla Speed McNeil and Jenn Manley Lee
It was just a trip, before college. Build schools in a Central American village; get to know some of the other freshmen. But after tragedy strikes, a handful of once-privileged US teens must find their way home in a cruel landscape that at best doesn’t like them, and at worst, actively wants to kill them.
No matter what, when a group of teenagers are put together, bad things tend to happen. In comedies, tragedies, horror stories — a bunch of adolescents thrown together is guaranteed drama. It’s easy to dismiss this as a sort of genre trope or easy way to elicit empathy or establish some sort of superiority over adolescents and their poor decisions or something (especially as we watch them die in whatever random slasher flick is playing this weekend), but I also think there’s something inherently interesting about kids in peril. They generally don’t have the skill set or knowledge on how to deal with a situation that’s bigger or scarier or wilder than them; after all, these are still people who are discovering how the world works and how they work within the world. They have the arrogance and ambition to launch into some impractical situation, and I think there’s something that we, as older readers maybe, can identify with in their choices and with how they work with other people.
“No Mercy” follows a group of kids, fresh out of high school and on their way to Princeton. They’re volunteering to help build houses in this fictional region of South America, mostly to help boost their resumes. After an unfortunate accident, they get stranded in unfamiliar territory, cut off from the rest of the world, and must figure out how they’re going to get home.
This book comes from Alex De Campi (“Archie vs. Predator” and a particularly fun issue of “Sensation Comics” where Wonder Woman battles space kaiju) and Carla Speed McNeil, whose magnificent “Finder” series is one of the craziest and coolest pieces of comic book work I’ve encountered. It’s colored by Jenn Marley Lee in a sort of marker method that keeps the palette dulled and all the more intense.
De Campi’s written enough of these tense and terse tales to know how to truly build up the tension. She keeps the pace slower, filled with seemingly superficial prattle to help establish these lost people. She leaves McNeil room to let them exchange quick, emotional glances or snide grimaces at each other. So, even from the beginning, before that ominous double-spread group shot with Facebook comments grieving that the kids were so young, there’s this omnipresent dread lingering in the gutters. And it doesn’t let up for the entire issue.
McNeil approaches the story with expert precision. Her layouts stay mostly in a three-tiered, six-panel grid at the start. It’s monotonous. It’s familiar, until the accident scene, when everything gets jagged and cut up. She groups the kids together as much as the panel border will allow, crowding them so close to together that at first none of them seem to have any true individuality or distinct personalities. It’s not until later, on the bus, when De Campi and McNeil start bringing in more of the more awful elements to their characters that these kids finally feel separate from each other. It’s an affecting attempt. She also gives them wild and over-exaggerated expressions (there are no subtle gestures on these kids, oh no) which also serve the emotion and reaction to the narrative.
I feel McNeil is sort of limited, though, possibly by the monthly 20-page format, or by how much information she needs to put into the issue. One of the the things I loved about her previous work was that she didn’t think anything of having a ten page sequence that was essentially a long zoom in on a town or city. The script is tighter here than her own work, and sometimes it feels like she’s cramping things together to fit it all in. But when McNeil hits, she hits hard. The bus crash sequence — with the pages adjunct to it — showcase the wide range of her talents, from the chaos of the crash, to the few objects trailing the bus down the cliff. It’s timed perfectly and precisely and totally evokes that other-worldly silence that follows an accident.
Continued belowIt’s an ensemble book and therefore there’s not enough time for McNeil or De Campi to give much more than broad strokes to these characters and their personalities. This first arc is allegedly 8 issues long, but with as many people who run around it, there’s ample room for expansion. I like the survivalist approach, and there’s not much of a supernatural element present either, at least not yet. (De Campi has said she’s trying to stay in more grounded terrain here, too.) Since it’s only the start of the series, the best we can do right now is speculate about what’s coming up. Was the accident really an accident? What kind of wild gang leaders and outlaws are roaming those hills? How wicked can these rich, confused, and frightened kids get with each other? What’s up with that awesome nun?
I have no idea how this book is going to turn out, but I’m hoping it stays more A High Wind in Jamaica than Degrassi.
Final Verdict: 7.9 — Though they don’t do much more than set the scene, Alex De Campi and Carla Speed McNeil deliver a fairly intense and chilling first issue.
