Blink #1 // Review
Wren is a freelance journalist. Somewhere in the midst of her research, she found something: a website with a multi-camera video feed. It was only open to her for a few seconds, but even that was long enough to awaken an obsession within her that has her husband worried about her. Wren’s chasing down the dark, forgotten corridors of her past in Blink #1. Writer Christopher Sebela establishes the groundwork for a compelling new series brought to the page by artist Hayden Sherman with clever color work by Nick Filardi. It’s a promising vision of horror that could lead in a lot of interesting directions.
Wren has been losing sleep. (That’s nothing new.) She’s also been missing a lot of potential work in her life as a freelance journalist. There are memories of a horror in her childhood. There was some kind of a basement involved. When a freelance video journalist friend of hers tracks down the basement in question, Wren and her friend get a bit more than they might have been expecting amidst the strange shadows of a sinister experiment involving quite a lot of people.
The contemporary horror story settles in around the edges of an engaging central psychological drama. Sebela introduces Wren as a troubled character. Any reader’s sympathy would be instantly engaged, but it’s what Sebela does with that sympathy that makes Blink potentially brilliant. The hero of this story already escaped a hell, but it’s a hell that she’s forgotten. Now she’s going back to confront it. She’s already a hero before the first panel. Now she’s going to find out just what she survived. The mystery of what lies ahead in the investigation could navigate through some VERY dark corridors of humanity before Wren emerges IF Sebela knows the right direction in which to point the panels.
Sherman slickly conjures the hell that Wren is living in. It’s a grainy, messy place that gradually gets worse and worse in the heart of a city. Sherman’s page composition keeps the action moving around with interesting angles and interesting visual perspectives that almost run the risk of overpowering Sebela’s script. Filardi’s color helps set the tone of the horror. Everything feels suitably saturated in shadowy color until Wren and her colleague dive into the basement. There’s a beautiful glow of green in the flashlights, and the glow coming from video monitors feels like the glow coming from an old CRT screen. The atmosphere here is powerful stuff.
The videotape and the glowing screens. It’s really, really difficult to translate the low-res feel of surveillance camera-style horror into a comic book format, but the feeling of the darkness and the claustrophobia of it all is lovingly transferred to the page. Sebela, Sherman, and Filardi have something intriguing. Whether or not there’s enough depth to go beyond the surface of the panel will remain to be seen, but the first issue of Blink feels like something truly new. And THAT doesn’t make it to the comics rack very often.
