The Webcomics Weekly is back in you life. This week Mel returns with a romance comic that follows a different flow. A channel that leads straight to a squid monster.
BLINK
Episodes 1-21
Complete
Created by REX OGLE and eDufR
Reviewed by Mel Lake
I will freely admit that I chose this comic solely based on the cover. In a sea of similar-looking romance comics covers, I went straight for the one that had a squid monster on it. But what I found was a beautiful love letter to humanity, New York City, and a journey through trauma and self-acceptance. “BLINK” is a completed Tapas Original webcomic with 21 episodes. It was published in 2019 (i.e., before the pandemic) but the isolation and world-stopping aspects of the story feel eerily prescient. The title doesn’t reveal much about the story or the lone main character, Mia, a young girl who suddenly becomes unstuck in time. She wanders through a frozen city, battling loneliness—and a terrifying tentacled squid monster.
Before the monster shows up, Mia is an average teenager living in terrible conditions. Her parents are abusive to one another and to her. She’s poor. She has trouble in school and difficulty making friends. To distract herself from sadness, she walks through New York City, but even then she has trouble escaping the sense that her life is meaningless. One day, when on her apartment building’s roof, time stops. Mia freezes the world. This sounds great, but while everything is frozen, all the joy and colors have been drained from it, too. Mia wanders through the city trying to unfreeze time, then trying to escape from a tentacled eldritch horror monster that pursues her and the other unstuck beings in the city.
I was in New York City last weekend, so seeing it beautifully rendered on the screen in this comic was absolutely lovely. I’m not a New Yorker but I have family there, and I do hear the call of the Big Apple when I haven’t visited in a while. “BLINK” shows us Mia’s everyday life in a gorgeous watercolor style, with the buildings and residents of the city lovingly painted. Even after they lose their color when frozen, the familiar landmarks are gorgeously drawn in black and white. Mia visits the lions outside the New York Public Library, shoplifts at swanky stores, and even hides out in a bodega. Her face and body are beautifully expressive, and the pop of color of her hoodie and her shoes make her stand out among the grayscale of the city. (The monster stands out as well, with horrifying suction cup tentacles and shadowy arms that grab Mia at every opportunity.) This is professional-level artwork from two creators with impressive resumes, and it absolutely shows. I would absolutely pick up a physical copy of this story based on the quality of the cityscapes and Mia’s character design.
Mia’s journey (up until the frozen time and tentacle monster) is familiar to anyone who has struggled in life. Mia experiences trauma from parental abuse and neglect. She must overcome an impoverished upbringing to accept the beauty in life along with the suffering. The monster she battles can be a stand-in for depression or another sort of mental illness. It represents the apathy and despair Mia feels as she travels the world alone, unable to affect change or find enjoyment in the world around her. When Mia finds a beautiful flower but it’s connected to the shadows that follow her, she realizes that the two are inseparable. Beauty and hope can only be appreciated in concert with their opposites. Only once Mia embraces the bad things in life as a part of her can she really be free to enjoy the good.
The amazing artwork in “BLINK” alone makes it worth a recommendation, but the story also holds its own. I almost wish it were called something different so that this comic would be more likely to stand out among a sea of similarly titled stories. It’s a beautiful meditation on despair and how to find peace within yourself while dealing with structural oppression and personal trauma. The artwork is perfectly suited to the story and it’s a quick read. I highly recommend this one.
