Ollie Masters (“The Kitchen”) and Tyler Jenkins (“Peter Panzerfaust”) bring their latest noir thriller to Boom! Studios. Long buried histories, angsty teenagers, and gruesome violence all come together to create this new haunting and intense story.
Written by Ollie Masters
Illustrated by Tyler JenkinsWhat’s to Love: With books like Hit and Day Men in our library, you can tell we absolutely love noir stories, and the more unconventional, the better! Critically acclaimed writer Ollie Masters (The Kitchen) and artist Tyler Jenkins (Peter Panzerfaust) have crafted a tense noir story in the tradition of Criminal, Scalped, and 100 Bullets, set in the bleak, snow-covered landscape of Alaska, a perfect setting to highlight the cold nature of crime.
What It Is: What happens when you discover your dad isn’t the man you thought he was? For high school teen Teddy, life in a sleepy suburb in Alaska turns upside-down when he innocently posts a photo of his dad on Facebook, only to learn he and his family are in the Witness Protection Program. A man seeking revenge invades their town, and soon FBI agents arrive, too. But what if his dad’s reasons for going into the program aren’t as innocent as he says?
Isolation plays a major role throughout Ollie Masters and Tyler Jones’s new miniseries from Boom! Studios, “Snow Blind.” Not just the isolation of being stuck somewhere, like up in Alaska, at the edge of the world where everything seems out-of-touch and running behind, but also the isolation of being removed from your home, of where you might have felt the most comfortable and happy, so you now desperately try to cling to that former culture with half-hearted gatherings that only leave you with a bitter, melancholic taste. There’s also the isolation from a community and friends, but also more importantly, an isolation from your own feelings and emotions, so you lie and pretend that you’re separating yourself, and feel like this is where you’re most comfortable, but you end up so desperate for attention and community that you end up making stupid choices.
All this comes out in “Snow Blind” #1.
Young Teddy desperately wants to get away from his parents and their small Alaskan town. He’s plotting his escape, trying out his options. His family is from Louisiana and frequently wax poetic about their old home, and Teddy doesn’t understand why they don’t simply move back if they miss it so badly. Turns out, his family is in the Witness Protection Program, and, after Teddy shares a photo of his dad passed on drunk that goes viral, the world they were trying to hide from comes crashing back.
This debut issue features a strong collaboration between Masters and Jenkins. They trust each other to tell separate parts of the story and they manage to bring it all together in a way that’s tense, terse, and effective. Jenkins accomplishes a lot with negative space and sparse images, creating another layer of isolation in the artwork itself. A home invader scene splits the page, surrounding a confrontation with the blankness of the page. Teddy is frequently surrounded by black, a small figure stuck in the middle of a larger problem. Even Jenkins’s colors, swashes of blue, conjure this feeling of emptiness and loneliness.
Masters’s script introduces information slowly, allowing it to unfold. Even that midnight confrontation has a quiet dream-like quality to it, and the tone of the book evokes films like Winter’s Bone, Fargo, and Night of the Hunter. (It’s probably no small detail that Teddy has a poster for The Thin Man hanging in the background of his room.) Masters understands which conventions to use and how to deploy them for the best effect, and though there’s maybe nothing we haven’t seen before in the plot, the story takes on its own life.
There was only one detail that brought me out of the story, where Teddy rents a car to follow someone. Look, I understand that this is Alaska and the laws up there might be far more lax, but even if you paid a hefty fee, you’d still have to be 21 to rent something. The story itself hadn’t built enough, or become gripping enough for this detail to be ignorable, and there might have been a way for Masters to spin this scene to give Teddy even more problems.
Otherwise, “Snow Blind” #1 is a nice, quiet, and intense little crime comic. The questions are gripping, we can understand Teddy, and the danger to this family feels very real, so the stakes come off authentically. Tyler Jenkins’s cold artwork gives the book another chill while Ollie Masters continually pulls great tension out of the plot. Reading this when it’s done might provide for a terse hour or so, but as it’s serialized, it has the capacity to become completely engrossing and gripping as everything comes barreling into these secluded characters.
Final Verdict: 7.7 – an effective and well-told start to a new crime thriller.
