Snyder and Murphy bring horror comics back to the forefront with this tale of a killer mermaid hunting down a team of scientists in a giant rig on the sea floor. Trust me, it’s a lot less silly than that sounds.
Written by Scott Snyder
Illustrated by Sean Murphy
A new species has been discovered at the bottom of the ocean, and as a result people are dying. Is it the missing link? Or a link to something even bigger? Marine biologist Lee Archer and her crew have to find out before things get much, much worse…
There’s an eternal struggle that comes with making comics and trying to create the most effective opening pages that will grab the reader and instantly engross them in the story the comic is trying to tell. With “The Wake” #3, Scott Snyder and Sean Murphy have to have found the most effective opening to a comic in a long time: presenting Mars as an Earth-like planet and proceeding to show something colliding with it in a massive, potentially planet-destroying explosion. Now, that’s how you open a comic. And, thankfully, because this is Snyder and Murphy we’re talking about, they don’t let those two opening pages overshadow the rest of the comic. This is just a really effective opening, which consists of only two dialogue free pages, that creates an intrigue in the reader going forward. This is practically a textbook example of how to make the opening pages of a comic grab the reader and Snyder and Murphy sure know how to make it work.
With the unfortunate dry streak Vertigo has been in for a while, the number of horror comics on the shelves started to dwindle. While Snyder also has “American Vampire”, it’s with “The Wake” that he and Murphy are going in a very different direction. Trapped in an enormous rig at the bottom of the sea with an inhuman creature, this is perhaps the closest we will get to the intense claustrophobia of films like Alien in a comic book. That sense of claustrophobia is largely thanks to Murphy’s art here, which is as masterful as ever. Murphy captures the feeling of industrial claustrophobia from the structure of the rig with cramped, narrow hallways and large bulkhead doors that always seem to trap unwitting souls in the with the creature. Not only that, but he manages to show that the rig is slowly filling up with water on each panel, something that is tricky to do with still panels. Even the splash page of the team attempting to escape the rig captures, thanks to excellent use of negative space, the scale and enormity of the environment compared to the characters the story is following.
A special mention must also go to Matt Hollingsworth’s colors, which really do bring the page to the life. Hollingsworth’s palette for the environment is soft and almost pastel, with a lot of blues and pinks. This brings a soft, almost-dreamlike feel to the environment, contrasting to both Murphy’s harsh and scratchy lines as well as to the fact that this is a comic book about a killer mermaid hunting a team of scientists. It’s a very measured way of not overbearing the pages with a sense of dread and keeping that entirely confined to the immediate danger the characters are in.
While the sense of claustrophobia is definitely derived from the artwork, the story’s sense of dread comes from Snyder’s writing. Again, the comparisons to Alien must be drawn as we finally see the creature stalking the characters through the rig, killing them off as they try to escape. One very effective sequence uses the creature’s ability to create hallucinations to subvert the reader’s expectations with an excellent page-turn reveal. Snyder and Murphy really show that no matter how safe the characters feel, it could very well be a lie. The sense of dread is palpable on the page as the creature relentlessly hounds the characters. Coupling that with an ending that dashes the characters’ hopes that they are in the clear and the dread then evolves into a sense of helplessness for the characters. Not only is this an effective horror comic, but Snyder connects the reader to the characters through a sense of overwhelming helpessness.
Continued belowAlso of note is that Snyder’s characteristic opening of relaying the character’s past through the form of a story from when they were young in narration doesn’t feature until the issues third chapter. This isn’t a complaint, this is a praising. Having it still at the start of the chapter, but at the chapter that closes the issue means we’ve already gone through the whole being chased by a giant killer mermaid sequence and through that we’ve already bonded with the character. The narration then serves to give the reader more context to who the character is. This works so much better here than it has in the past and might be the best implementation of it Snyder has used.
All in all, if you have a craving for a very solid horror comic and you’ve been jonesing for that fix since “American Vampire” went on hiatus, you should be picking this up. Snyder is not only as good as ever, but the structure of “The Wake”‘s issues mean that he’s even better than usual here. And, unless you somehow dislike his art, Murphy is as jaw-droppingly attentive to detail here as always and the issue is worth it for his art alone.
Finaly Verdict: 8.9 – Strong buy, especially for fans of horror comics.
