A Town Called Terror #1 // Review
A man in a bio-suit scans a security badge to get into a lab. A few things click into place, but evidently, he'd forgotten to connect the head. It's okay. The guy's alive again. He's asking how his funeral was. Welcome to A Town Called Terror. Writer Steve Niles and artist Szymon Kudranski welcome readers to a whole new world with the first issue of a new dramatic horror series. The page is saturated with darkness, dramatic lighting, and mystery that will, undoubtedly, be slowly revealed in the coming months as the series progresses. The moody mystery makes its mark in a promising opening chapter.
Terror is a small town. (Population 1300 according to the sign on the way into town.) It's described as a hidden home of monsters and freaks. Seems like Henry grew up there. He never expected to be back. He's been "summoned." He's been brutally kidnapped in the middle of the night. All his wife can do is look on as it happens. She calls the police, but they aren't much help. Neither is 911. She doesn't know it, but Henry's father has died. Now he's returning to Terror. It's not a pretty place, but there's plenty of atmosphere.
Brutality. Violence. Reanimation. It's all in there. Niles is greeting his readers with a series of events that are all similar in tone but not necessarily connected together all that clearly. Henry and his wife are pretty solidly rendered in the opening pages of the series, but there is a HELL of a lot of unanswered questions that seem to be lurking around just about everywhere. It's a bold way to open a story without much more than mystery and a single couple that isn't shown together in a whole lot of detail before the big kidnapping. It might work in the long run, but the opening issue is a bit of a challenge for the reader to engage with.
The artwork helps a lot. Kudranski is bathing the page in dark colors and dramatic angles. Traditional visions of creepiness move across the page with vivid style and a suitably slinky poise. Niles has handed Kudranski an admirable challenge in trying to connect with the story. The artist does a good job of making it work. If nothing else, the visual world of Terror seems to have a unique look that works quite well. It's a very engaging atmosphere, if nothing else.
There isn't quite enough story delivered in the first issue to truly get into what the series is ultimately going to be about. There's a real danger in ambiguity on this level to open a series. Readers might not feel interested enough in what's going on to care about a second issue. Then…it might seem potentially good but then fall apart as the mystery begins to reveal itself to be something less appealing than the shadow and mystery that dominates the pages of early issues. As for now, it's one to watch…maybe out of the corner of the eye to see if it might turn into something worth watching a bit more closely.
