Trve Kvlt #1 // Review
Marty’s a respectable guy. He’s got a steady job that he’s held for years. He’s very good at what he does. Granted...what he does is work in fast food. People don’t tend to respect that. It doesn’t matter to Marty, though. His life is about to change in Trve Kvlt #1. Writer Scott Bryan Wilson puts together a gripping social satire set in the fading light of late-stage capitalism. The weird world of fast food and strip malls comes to page and panel courtesy of artist Liana Kangas. Color bleeds into the atmosphere of the issue courtesy of Gab Contreras.
Marty’s been working for the Burger Lord like...forever. He’s been planning a little something on the side for a while, though. See, one fateful day, he was cleaning up when he found a handgun in a paper bag with a large sum of cash. That’s when he got the idea to roll through a local strip mall with a mask making a few extra dollars. Then he showed up for work to interview a girl named Alison for a position at the Burger Lord. Could she know a little bit more than she’s letting on about Marty’s criminal activity? And what’s the deal with the Satanists that have dropped by in the middle of the interview?
Wilson’s script plays with a very mundane and earthbound service industry setting to gradually pull the reader into a deeply compelling offbeat comedy. The first page establishes Marty as someone with great potential. At the top of the second page, he’s clocking in. At the bottom of the page, he’s putting on a mask and heading out to get some money with a gun. This isn’t glamorous. This is just one guy looking for something more. Then he interviews Alison...who is WAY too into working in fast food to be real. Then the Satanists show up.
Kangas’s layout is very clever. The monotony of life in the service sector comes across brilliantly. There’s a beautiful kind of stillness to the action that fits the listlessness of a dead-end job brilliantly. Kangas is brilliantly vague with the line work. She delivers mood and emotion with clever quirks of perspective. Marty’s relief at wrapping up a day of crime is cleverly delivered in a page of nine nearly identical panels. Police come into the Burger Lord as he’s interviewing Alison. The reader feels his slow panic in a series of panels from Marty’s perspective. He’s hearing a story she’s telling, but the center of the panel has slid over to the police, who are now talking with his supervisor. It’s subtly clever stuff.
It’s difficult to tell quite where Wilson’s going, but it’s definitely going to be fun watching him get there. Blue-collar people getting mixed up in crime is well-traveled territory in pop fiction, but Wilson and Kangas have found a very distinct voice for their story that is quirky and surreal without losing a very firm grounding in the realm of the believably mundane. If they can maintain a firm footing in the distinct voice that they’ve developed for the first issue, it’s going to be a lot of fun.
