Chilling Adventures Present: The Nine Lives of Salem #1 // Review
He’s being summoned. By demons. Various small creatures are guiding him to an old house. All their eyes glow red. This would be pretty disturbing for anyone, but he’s been accustomed to this sort of thing since long before he ever walked around on four legs. There are nine of them that have summoned him and they all want him dead. He should know: he created them. He’s going to have to confront the demons of his past in Chilling Adventures Present: The Nine Lives of Salem #1. Writer Cullen Bunn delivers the one-shot to page and panel with the art team of Dan Shoening and Ben Galvan. Color comes to the page courtesy of Matt Herms.
They are embodiments of hate, malice, wickedness and evil. And they’re all trying to kill a cat. That cat hadn’t always been a cat, though. He had been a wielder of dark arts who looks to close a chapter in his life as he confronts those who want him dead in an old house that is quite literally haunted with evil. He had created the creatures and gifted them to other colleagues. All of the rest of them have died. And now there’s just the one left to be killed: the cat named Salem.
Bunn does a really good job of moving the plot forward while explaining the backstory. The ability to do both at the same time as actually really impressive. The forward momentum is maintained, even though there's a whole lot of backstory that needs to be developed. And the reader is gradually acquainted with the origins of the conflict as the conflict unfold. It's a really deft way to write a script and it works really well. There's a delicious kind of darkness in the way of the story place out. And there's a lot going on that doesn't necessarily meet the panel. So it's interesting to see how Bunn delivers the ending.
Shoening and Galvan have the mood down right. And certainly there is a retro style that's going on in page and panel. That feels very much like something from an earlier era. That's really cool. The color affects that Herms employees don't necessarily fit the visuals of the rest of the issue, though. So it feels a little strange. That being said, the action only feels stiff in certain places. it's really difficult to bring a story to the page where the hero just happens to be a perfectly normal domestic cat. At least visually. The team does impressive work making a largely non-anthropomorphized cat as a sort of a dark and sinister hero.
This is a follow up to an issue that came out a couple of years ago. Theoretically the character would work really well as an ongoing monthly series. It's perfectly well and good to do the occasional one shot with a character like this. But it would really open up considerably to allow that character plenty of room to travel. They haven't been nearly enough attempts at a domestic cat as a single hero in a fantasy series. It really does have great potential for both commercial and artistic success.
