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

-

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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Deluxe Edition- this day, 1985!

-
Image
Thirty three years ago, today! (That is, August 27th, 1985) Oh, the stories these opened up for me. Alphabetically, fans could find every character still living who'd made at least three appearances, as well as many brand new lights. Origins, major life events, stories from twenty-five years of great Marvel continuity. You could even find out how tall, how heavy, or what color eyes the character should have, which sort of personalizes them and makes them all the more easy to imagine. You could find some description of every single power a character has, and often, see an Eliot R. Brown- illustrated blueprint for their best known weapons, vehicles, and acoutrement. But what could ever be more fuel for debate than : STrength Level! I was eleven when the series started, so of course I still found this part cool and interesting. Fans have been debating the strength levels of their favorite heroes and villains since comics began, so here was the sometimes controversial but ...
Read more

Eminem's Rap God sample: that's Captain America and the Falcon, from Power Records!

-
Image
What do Eminem and most Integr8d Fix readers have in common? Comic books, man. As a boy, I had two Power Records, a brand that released dramatized versions of comic books on 45 rpm, complete with a book sampling most of the comic's artwork. The first was a stand-alone Superman adventure I think was written by Elliot S! Maggin, where aliens fell to earth in the form of silver-hued bullets. The second one, I only had the record, but it was intense: Captain America and the Falcon confront the mystery of The Phoenix, a man whose thirst for revenge is born from Cap's battles in the world war before his frozen suspension. I didn't get hooked on Eminem's 2013 release "Rap God" until I was putting together a hip hop playlist this September. Not unlike when Anj and I discovered Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre back in college, I was wrestling with an angry mood over someone who cheated me of recording time after I gave up eleven Sundays of my life to give...his initials ...
Read more

Lost World of Apes: the Bili and Mangani

-
Image
Mangani is the name of a fictional species of great apes in the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and of the invented language used by these apes. In the invented language, Mangani (meaning "great-ape") is the apes' word for their own kind, although the term is also applied (with modifications) to humans. The Mangani are represented as the apes who foster and raise Tarzan. Dr. Peter Coogan wrote a page on the synthetic language created for the Mangani and Tarzan, provided here in pdf: http://www.pjfarmer.com/woldnewton/Mangani.pdf The language of the great apes of Africa that Edgar Rice Burroughs depicts in the Tarzan novels is not some simple, made-up collection of sounds substituting for English. It is a representation of a deeply structured, complex linguistic sign system with a grammar and syntax of its own. This grammar has never been worked out because its last living native speakers (with the exception of Tarzan himself) went extinct in the last century. Unfor...
Read more