High School. It’s one of those messy, confusing times that most of us had to live through and while I didn’t mind high school that much, it was not an experience I wish to repeat.
Unfortunately, high school is so universal and so well known by so many people that it’s one of those times and places that Hollywood loves to revisit over and over. In fact, Hollywood has deconstructed the high school experience so often, that pointing out how cliched high school movies are is itself a massive cliche.
The good news is that, with such a well established library of cliches, high school drama is a malleable setting that can be applied to any genre and nearly any artistic medium.
Case in point: here’s a high school horror comic called “The Ocean Will Take Us”.
Written by Rich DouekCover by: Carlos Olivares and Manuel Puppo
Illustrated by Carlos Olivares
Colored by Manuel Puppo
Lettered by Dave Sharpe
Something’s lurking in the waters of Almanzar Bay – and when Casey March tries out for the swim team, he learns firsthand that messing with the social order of his new high school can have dangerous – even deadly – consequences!From Bram Stoker-Award nominated writer Rich Douek (Sea of Sorrows, Road of Bones) and artist Carlos Olivares, comes a new tale of horror and intrigue – where a group of high school outcasts band together to fight a growing evil in their school and town.
Casey just moved to the town of Alamanzar and he is very much the new kid. The town seems like a fairly normal California coastal town that was on its last legs until a mysterious corporation named Triton Oceanic swooped in and promised to open a renewable energy power plant that gave nearly everyone in the town a new job and a new lease on life. Fortunately for Casey he has two things going for him. First, is his new friend and next door neighbor Piper Rigby who is the school’s resident guide and horror movie nerd. The second is the fact that he is a swimmer and if there is one thing that Alamanzar High School is known for, it’s a championship winning swim team.
Unfortunately for Casey, the school is still plagued with the usual pitfalls and dangers of high school life, including a particularly vicious group of swim team jocks who seem to take special pleasure in torturing other students and getting away with it. Also, there’s a mysterious black goo in the water that has a nasty habit of killing the students.
“The Ocean Will Take Us” #1 is written by Rich Douek, who has crafted an effective and efficient introduction to a classic horror story. The threat of the strange black goo is established quickly, but there is still plenty of mystery surrounding it to make the audience curious. On top of that, Douek does a very good job of leaving much of the large scale world building towards the end of the book, preferring to leave the big picture stuff to newspaper articles at the end of the first issue. This allows the audience to quickly understand what’s going on and lets the characters talk like actual people instead of exposition machines.
Speaking of characters, Casey is a fine protagonist who goes through the usual motions of the story’s first act and does a great job of being receptive to the social exposition and horror movie geek out monologue provided by Piper, who is absolutely not being set up as a potential love interest at all, and even manages to hold his own against the gang of swim team bullies. While Caleb may be a fish out of water (pun intended), there is still plenty of space and opportunity for him to increase his social standing in the school and grow as a character.
While the world building and characters in “The Ocean Will Take Us” #1 is good, this is not the place to go if you’re looking for a story that breaks the very traditional mold of high school drama stories. The jocks are violent and cruel monsters, the nerds get shoved into lockers, the cheerleaders are catty, and the teachers don’t seem to care at all. Granted, the book has to quickly establish the characters, setting, and existential threat while still being entertaining enough to keep reading, but nearly everything outside of Caleb and Piper’s dynamic is almost paint by numbers predictable.
Continued belowThe artwork for “The Ocean Will Take Us” #1 is provided by Carlos Olivares with colors by Manuel Puppo. Olivares has a style that could easily be described as ligne claire meets manga. For anyone who might not know, ligne claire was an art style that was popular in Europe with artists like Herge and was characterized by the combination of hyper realistic backgrounds coupled with highly stylized characters with comparatively simple features and design. The difference is that while Herge’s characters usually had beady eyes and small facial features, Olivares goes for the complete opposite approach and gives his characters big eyes and exaggerated features that look like they would be more at home in Japanese manga. It’s an interesting choice and Oliviares does a weird thing where some of the male characters have really pointy noses, but it allows the characters to be incredibly expressive and does a great job of enhancing the story.
However, the real highlight of “The Ocean Will Take Us” #1 comes from the combination of Oliviares’ backgrounds and Puppo’s bright and gorgeous colors. Puppo gives the book a rich and warm palette that makes the book feel like less of a horror story and more of a young adult slice of life story, which goes a long way towards making the setting appear warm and inviting long enough to suck the reader in before the real horror starts.
“The Ocean WIll Take Us” #1 is a pretty run of the mill introduction to the kind of high school drama that most of us have already seen before. But beneath the surface of this seemingly tranquil and gorgeously drawn town is something dark and sinister, and it’s not just the black goo monster that the reader should be worried about.
Final Verdict: 8.1- Your mileage may vary depending on how much you like high school drama stories, but it’s a solid take on a tried and true formula with very pretty artwork.
