Purr Evil #1 // Review
The crusts have been cut off of a sandwich that rests elegantly on a plate. What a beautiful view: the lovely Seattle skyline at night. The bar is well stocked. It would be a really nice place to hang out were it not for all of the blood and dead bodies littering the place and the pool. There’s a woman there. Voices keep telling her to inform the last survivor that she’s a hopeless lunatic. Then there’s an explosion. The woman’s daughter shows up to help clean up in Purr Evil #1. Writer Mirka Andolfo opens up an intriguing new miniseries with artist Laura Braga.
Her name is Rita Morando. Her landlord is a bit upset about the sounds coming from her apartment. She tries to make it up to him by handing in rent in advance. It would be a nice gesture if it wasn’t for the fact that the envelope she hands it in on is spattered with what appears to be blood. Her daughter’s name is Deb. She rarely makes it out of the apartment. She’s trying to get her mother to be a bit more sociable, but Deb and Rita aren’t exactly the normal mother and daughter living in an apartment in Seattle. There’s something different about them.
Andolfo opens the series with a bizarre mystery of an opening scene and then allows the rest of the activity to flow from it. After the first couple of pages...there IS something weird about Deb and Rita, but you wouldn’t think that they’d just been involved in a lot of blood and dead bodies at a posh apartment in downtown Seattle. It’s a smart way to open what gradually becomes something of an occult mystery that sneaks in delicate bits of horror around the edges of a perfectly respectable family drama.
So much of the first issue takes place in a cozy little apartment. Braga is rather brilliant about delivering the complex depth of that apartment to the page. There are a lot of clean lines and feature list surfaces going on in the apartment complex. However, the depth, shading, and architectural work that Braga is doing allow for a profoundly atmospheric sense of location. It’s all so nice and quaint and cozy. When the occult kicks in at the end of the issue, it hits like a hammer...a very, very strange and disorienting hammer.
The first issue engages the reader through a sense of mystery and weirdness. So much of what drives the action from page to page lies in the foundations of that mystery. There is a little bit of intriguing drama with Deb. She seems like a truly interesting character. However, that might not be enough to keep this series feeling novel. A series based in mystery can rather quickly turn out to be dull in full view. The first issue’s great. Andolfo is going to have to tread carefully in the issues to come. It’s a fun story so far, but occult and gore and family drama...could turn unpleasantly silly really, really quickly.
