W0rldtr33 #3 // Review
There’s a young, naked woman walking along the side of the road at night. There’s a fire across the street. A concerned guy in a car slows down to ask her if she’s okay. She says she’s actually had a really good day. Then she smashes his face into the side windshield with a single hand and smears his face in the broken auto glass. It’s another night in W0rldtr33 #3. Writer James Tynion IV continues a dark contemporary cyberpunk tale featuring art by Fernando Blanco. Depth, mood, and so much more are added by genius colorist Jordie Bellaire.
After she’s finished rubbing the guy’s face in glass, she drags his body out of his car, gets in, and drives off. Elsewhere, someone is waking up in a chair. He notices the cords, so he asks a bearded guy in glasses what he’s plugged into. “The wall,” he says. “You’re plugged into the wall.” Now that he’s awake, they’re both going to find out why he’s plugged into the wall. Evidently, the whole thing is tied up in a website. A forum. Some kind of dark web thing that had been uncovered. The man tied to the chair is going to have to answer a few questions.
Tynion has a way of twisting cliche until it confesses some kind of strange truth. The five-page interrogation ends up forcing the guy in the chair to define a casual romantic relationship he has with a woman under threat of something awful. He’s not just getting to the truth about what his brother found on the internet...he’s getting to the truth about his life. Tynion takes the cliche of an interrogation and turns it into something altogether darker. Scenes play out that all manage that level of twist on cliche in ways that dive more deeply into the implications of paranoid mystery horror fiction than the genre typically manages.
The entire issue takes place at night. Some of the scenes are inside. Some of the scenes are outside. The ambient darkness that coats the issue is present in the heavy ink of shadows that are brought to the page by Blanco. The highlights in and around all those shadows lend each scene its distinct personality and atmosphere courtesy of Bellaire’s colors. The interrogation is sort of a Matrix-y light green, but Bellaire makes it feel distinct to the scene. The flames that light up the night in the opening sequence are warm and wild. Cold blues and grays dominate the page, which are occasionally hit by this cool pseudo-sorta-kinda posterization effect that amplifies the horror and makes it feel coolly techno and low-res. It’s a cheap effect, but it’s a powerful one.
Once Tynion starts to dive into the mystery at the heart of the series, it’s actually a pretty silly concept. Judging from what Tynion’s revealed so far, the 30-second elevator pitch for W0rldtr33 would come across as sounding incredibly bad. (Of course...ANY 30-second elevator pitch is going to sound awful...) Exactly how Tynion is going to make the premise feel anything other than cheesy is a matter for future issues. For now, it’s all cool, atmospheric, and ambiguous enough to be fun.
