What would you do for fame? To exist in the spotlight, to be so powerful you can do anything and just get away with it. To have all eyes on you and have no accountability for anything. What you do to be a celebrity? Would you sacrifice everything? Would you sell your soul?
This is the world of “The Forevers” from Curt Pires, Eric Scott Pfeiffer, Colin Bell and Ryan Ferrier and this is our full review of the first issue. Be warned, this my contain slight spoilers, but really you shouldn’t need me to tell you to read this comic.
Written by Curt Pires
Illustrated by Eric Scott Pfeiffer
Live fast. Live forever. Five friends struggling on the brink of stardom sacrifice everything in a black magic pact that brings them all the wealth and glamour they ever wanted. But now, years later, the glow is fading. When one of them is killed in an accident, they each feel a pulse of magic rise in them. They realize the glow is spread evenly among the group, and if one dies that power is passed along to the rest. Suddenly, they are being hunted. One of them has decided to kill the rest and harness the remaining power. As they search for the killer, each of The Forevers will be confronted by the macabre reality of the lengths people will go to be adored, to make sure the spotlight never fades.
“The Forevers” #1 is not a comic for the faint of heart. You should pretty much guess that this is par for the course from a comic published by Black Mask Studios, but “The Forevers” is especially dark. Curt Pires and Eric Pfeiffer have dug down deep to create a cast of characters who have thrown their entire lives away in order to gain unparalleled fame and fortune only to be now suffering the consequences. It is a disturbing look at the nature of self-destruction in the pursuit of celebrity. Feeling very much in the same vein as Pires’ earlier works such as “POP” and “Mayday”, this is a look at the world of celebrity (and, by extension, Hollywood and Los Angeles in general) and the debauchery that sits just under the surface.
This first issue, interestingly enough, largely skips over the central conceit that these people used black magick to gain this level of fame. Sure, the comic opens with them lighting a massive sigil and uses that scene to introduce the reader to each of the seven members of the group, but the majority of the issue is spent some years later in order to show just where they all wound up. The common thread between the three characters of the group that Pires and Pfeiffer focus on after the skip in time is that they’re a mess. Washed up and strung out, barely containing themselves in a wave of self-destruction that looks to infect everyone else in the group, they’ve got everything they wanted and more and it’s killing them. That’s the core of this issue that works so well; Pires spends a lot of time showing who these characters are, devoid of all the magick, in order to show you just how fucked up they’ve become since lighting the sigil.
It’s somewhat appropriate for a comic about celebrity and that features a film premiere to feel like it has been edited like a movie. It’s a hard feeling to describe, but I’m going to do my best here. Pires and Pfeiffer have created a narrative in this comic that jumps from scene to scene and juxtaposes moments in a way that feels like non-linear editing in a film. This does not simply feel like a comic that lays out all of its moments in a row and shows us each moment in a new panel. A great deal of care seems to have gone into the structure and the layout of this issue from using dialogue to transition from scene to scene to using what is essentially a montage of panels to capture a lot of information across a period of time in one page. One page in particular shows a character go from complaining about a boring party to having sex to reflecting on herself to walking home all in the space of four panels. It feels structured to have the same, jarring narrative jump as, say, four jump cuts would in a film.
Continued belowThe same can be said for how the climax of this issue is structured as Pires and Pfeiffer juxtapose two scenes happening across a number of pages. We see one character break down and give into this demon that has been consuming them and we see another character consumed by the consequences they have wrought on themselves. Juxtaposing these scenes shows a connection, more thematic than literal, that shows how these characters’ actions are coming back to haunt them. Pfeiffer structures the pages with two columns of panels with each scene in either column and, much like the montage page, feels close to when a film will cut back and forth between two scenes to show their connection. Thanks to the nature of comics, however, Pfeiffer is able to show each scene at the same time, showing them side by side to illustrate this connection.
Pfeiffer’s work is stunning in this issue. Utilising a digital painting technique, his work has a dramatic texture to it that gives the issue a great deal of depth. There’s an abstract quality to the way Pfeiffer uses blurred backgrounds, creating a somewhat surrealist flavour to the issue. It puts the characters in stark relief to a background that is hazy and not all together there that removes a sense of place from the scene. Characters float through these abstract backgrounds of changing colours the way they float through society from one party to the next, only stopping to establish a new location with an establishing panel that changes the colour palette of the scene. It’s a disorienting effect, to be sure, and means that the colour palette of each scene is the reader’s main source of being able to tell where the action is taking place; something that’s especially important when Pfeiffer juxtaposes two scenes.
Something of note is how Pfeiffer uses real world celebrities as the facial models for these characters. It’s, again, somewhat disorienting at first, but also plays into this feeling of a comic being structured almost like a movie. It’s almost as if Pfeiffer drew the comic as if these real world celebrities were playing these characters. Of the three characters this first issue focuses on, it’s fairly easy to pick out that one is modelled after Kate Moss while another seems like he was inspired by Thom Yorke. The third is harder to identify (and that’s where my whole thesis of this paragraph kind of falls apart), but a fourth character, who is a major spoiler, shows up in the final pages and is modelled after an actor who is immediately recognisable. It’s a frankly fascinating choice and one that makes this issue worth pouring over past the initial read.
All in all, “The Forevers” #1 once again proves that Curt Pires is one of the most inventive writers working in comics today. His use of intricate characterisation and character relationships is in major focus in this issue, but he pulls it off masterfully with a cast of characters who have destroyed themselves in pursuit of fame. Working with Eric Pfeiffer, whose surrealistic painting and film-like narrative layouts give the issue an almost Lynch-ian quality, Pires has topped himself yet again with another must-read comic. It’s hard to say just what kind of journey “The Forevers” will take us on, but this first issue has ensured that I am on board for the ride, no matter what.
Final Verdict: 9.6 – A fantastic first issue from some of the most talented creators working today.
