Spill Night / Spill Zone: Free Comic Book Day Review 5/5

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Scott Westerfeld/ Alex Puvilland Spill Night

Masterful.

I don’t think Free Comic Book Day is meant to display, necessarily, how talented a creative team is at tying up a big story. You want a complete presentation, but ideally, a free comic should leave you excited, practically dying to find out what happens next!


Spill Night delivers. MK and I were in accord: we wanted to spend money collecting more of this series. It’s a preview to the graphic novel Spill Zone, which is serialized on spillzone.com; it’s also available in comics shops and book stores in print.

A little girl and her doll, Vespertine- which holds the voice of her imaginary friend- see a bizarre, colorful energy altering her hometown. With a street-wise voice, Vespertine criticizes absent older sister Addison while guiding the little sister through the enigmatic, encroaching menace. The doll helps her escape, searching desperately for its allies that may have come over from the other side in this energetic invasion. Darkly, they observe adults fall victim to the Spill, while fleeing on foot and bicycle, alone. What seems to be brightly-colored cats, the doll says eerily, are really scavengers such events conjure.

Three years later, Addison re-visits the Spill Zone on a regular basis, risking her life to photograph its bizarre, dangerous effects, with Vespertine riding inanimately along. We switch from observing a dialogue to a narrated monologue, as Addison hints at the conditions with her six ominous rules of survival.

Spill Zone art- check out Spillzone.com!

With so much left unexplained, amid so much intrigue and vividly-colored cartoon art by Dreamworks animator Alex Puvilland, Spill Night sucks you in at the point of view of the two sisters, vulnerable, the innocent and her young protector, with claustrophobic horror and imaginative, child-like fun.

Five *’s of Five!

C Lue

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