Nolan Ward is many things. He’s a day trader. A drinker. A womanizer. He’s also an artist and a serial killer. He knows what he’s doing, but he may not exactly know who he is as he will soon find out in The Feeding #1. Writer David M. Booher, artist Drew Zucker and colorist Vittorio Astone deliver a one-shot horror story to the page for a fun, little excursion into the darkness that feels like a meeting between a few different horror tropes on a shadowy place on some dark night. There’s much to be admired about a single story that crawls its way across the page with the kind of style that The Feeding manages.

Nolan Ward grew-up in a house with a monster living in it. His house burned down. It was a dark point in his past. Years later he was haunted by that memory....though he HAD managed a kind of financial success that many only dream of. One night he runs into a gallery owner. He’s an artist, but he’s only ever done one painting. He’s a serial killer, but only out of necessity as an artist. The one painting he has ever done...is hungry.

Booher throws a couple of different elements of horror together in a way that tilt precariously across the page. The tortured artist IS the wealthy, young executive who happens to be rushing headlong into the danger of his own potential. The art piece that turns out to be the center of the drama feels suitably creepy as it articulates with concepts of art, expression, hunger and nightmare. It all fuses together on the page in a way that makes for a fun, little terror the feels like it might be a bi more than the sum of its panels. 

Zucker does a really good job with the overall layout of the issue. There’s a fun decentralized sense of action about everything that seems to move across the page like a weird shadow. The general shape and form of the painting at the center of the story feels interesting enough, but Asotne’s colors really make the visual reality of The Feeding live. The painting itself feels like it exists on an entirely different plane of existence than the rest of the story, which is actually kind of cool and not something that would have been at all possible without clever color effects managed by Astone.

The Feeding is the type of thing that would have been totally compressed in 1950s horror anthology and the m crushed under the weight of way too much unnecessary narration. The stylish nature of the whole thing feels sharply delivered in a way that feels more or less perfect. Though it DOES seem to suggest a kind of a deeper theme about the nature of hunger and expression, there really isn’t a whole lot going on on the page that necessarily feels all that deep, which is a pity. It’s a fun story that had a lot of potential to go deeper than the surface.

Grade: B