Written by Ben McCool
Illustrated by Nikki CookISSUE TWO: THE MEETING
Trent MacGowan has but one agenda while reporting on the strange case of Lowesville: exploitation. An interview with Bob Rockman–a resident claiming to remember everything about the town’s enigmatic history–is his first big break. Will it support Trent’s cause, or help unleash an evil beyond his wildest dreams?
It’s funny: most people that know me know that I usually avoid horror films like the plague. Some people like the rush they feel from being purely and simply scared. I am not one of them. Yet, the first issue of McCool and Cook’s horror/mystery mini-series was both gripping and dramatic and drew me in way more than I expected. Does issue 2 continue the trend? Clickity click to find out!
The issue opens with a pretty major flashback before we cut to a particularly gruesome FBI agent surveying the scene uncovered at the end of the last issue. It makes sense that a pit of unidentified bodies in the middle of a town that lost its memory would garner federal attention, but this one quick scene is pretty much the only mention of that pit over the course of this issue. The large bulk of the issue is dedicated to Trent’s interview with Bob Rockman, the only person in the entire town that claims to remember what happened the day everyone lost their memory. Now, while last issue was very much a set up issue that introduced us to Trent and the situation of the town, this too was also a bit of a set up issue to the parallel story being told here. My guess moving forward we’ll be seeing a lot of this juxtaposition of “what happened” and “Trent discovering and dealing with it” until, I assume, they’ll dovetail at the end.
McCool manages to make the transitioning between flashback and present day story very fluid, to the point that I had to read several pages twice to make sure I knew what time period they were happening in. Furthermore, the way the personalities of Trent and the visiting FBI agent popped through the ether when compared to the dialogue of the townspeople really helps illustrate the lost, hopeless nature of the town. They lost their memories and in a way, they also appeared to lose their souls and anything that could pass for luster. The complete lack of human pathos is just haunting, and just one of the chilling bits of interplay going on.
On the art side, a story like this (and indeed with most horror comics I’ve read) just would be completely ineffective with sub-par of unfitting art. Thankfully, this book is made immeasurably more solid by the work of Nikki Cook. An artist publishing in black and white has a LOT more pressure behind them than one that lays the basis for a colorist. Its a lot like when the famous rock frontman picks up an acoustic guitar and goes solo…if they didn’t actually have talent under the wail of their bandmates, you know it pretty quick. However, Cook steps up to the challenge and really brings these scenes to life. He use of shading and darkness really adds to the uneasy ambiance the book puts forward and some of her compositions and use of negative space in one particular shot of self-mutilation was superb. However, it really is her character compositions that succeed more than any other aspect. Simply put: if the corpses in this book didn’t look as grotesque as they do, it wouldn’t work as well. But they do, and it does. Very much so.
Overall, the concept of this book is in and of itself alluring and scary: an entire town waking up one morning with no memory? It’s a terrifying concept for me to fathom given that my mind is probably my greatest asset and is what drew me to the book in the first place…the fact that there are also pits of corpses, shady most likely government dealings and weird shadow creatures with murder on their mind is just cake at this point.
Final Verdict: 9.0 – Buy
