Trve Kvlt #3 // Review
Marty and Alison are in over their heads. Marty has been mistaken for someone he’s not, and now his only options are to kill some stranger or die. His only company happens to be a woman he just hired to work at the same fast-food joint that he’s managing. Writer Scott Bryan Wilson continues Trve Kvlt into its third chapter with further weirdness brought to the page by artist Liana Kangas. Color comes courtesy of Gab Contreras. The series reaches its midway point with a pleasantly strange twist on the traditional crime drama/occult/satirical drive-through combo order.
It’s a single, little church in the middle of the desert. Marty and Alison will pose as romantic partners as they infiltrate the place. The church is a somewhat hip sort of Satanism/Scientology fusion operation. Marty and Alison are supposed to get in, go to the 66th level down in the subterranean skyscraper beneath the church and kill some old guy. To get there, Marty and Alison have to live through an endless parade of different lives they could be leading in something that plays out like a Scientological auditing session from hell.
Wilson’s bizarrely idiosyncratic writing is a lot of fun. So much of the weirdness is passed along with a casual shrug, which might actually be the most charming aspect of the script. (That and the fact that Alison is a total badass.) The series gets tremendous mileage out of the inspired juxtaposition between the incredibly mundane (life in and around the fast-food industry) and the fantastic (an inverted skyscraper in the desert). The charm that doesn’t draw the reader in through the sheer oddness of everything comes in the form of two extremely capable people with a passion for fast food...one of whom is completely out of his element.
Kangas deftly plays with the fusion between weird horror surrealism and crushingly mundane reality. The artist’s layout for the third issue is occasionally breathtaking. Kangas is particularly genius when Marty rolls through a portion of the hundreds of lives that he lives through in his Satanic audit. Three consecutive pages show little variation in the lives that Marty could be leading. Later on, Alison and Marty’s descent to the 66th level is shown from a distance, accompanied by long dialogue that gradually works its way down the page.
The next issue has been announced as the penultimate chapter in the series. There’s no amount of exposition that will make any of what’s gone on so far feel normal. There’s a deep comfort in that. Wilson and Kangas have rolled through the midpoint of a series so pleasantly twisted that there’s no hope of it being pounded into blandness by the last couple of issues...because even if it were to do so, at this point, THAT would be weird enough to serve as some sort of satisfying point on which to end the series. With that relief firmly in place, it’ll be fun to see where Trve Kvlt goes next.
