Broken Frontier

With an unconventional work week spurred by deadlines at all corners, I decided to get a head start on some webcomics which have been lying around the old BF e-mail. One of these was a horror series my editor had forwarded to me entitled Split Lip, which I decided to give a try right before going to bed.

Big mistake.

This explains why I'm currently writing this review at this hour of the night – and also why I'm fearing the sight of a gnarled naked old man hovering outside my window among thousands of other horrors when I turn off this light.

Sam Costello's "Split Lip" is probably the most meaningful horror webcomic on the Internet right now. The anthology is as compelling as "The Twilight Zone" – and usually just as creepy. The stories are starkly illustrated by a bevy of the best comic book artist on print and on the web, and sparsely told in the span of several engrossingly terrifying pages.

If there is one consistency to Split Lip, it's the sparseness to each story. Nearly every story I've read ends on a twist or cliffhanger. Normally, this would frustrate the heck out of me, but strangely enough, every one of Costello's stories so intricately and expertly executed that the final result is satisfying time and time again – no matter how the terrifying tale ends.

Perhaps one reason the cliffhanger endings aren't inherently frustrating is Costello imbues us with the sheer emotion of the moment instead of hitting our heads with an implied but unseen endings. Costello seems to understand the best ending is the one we envision within our heads and doesn't put a premium on what we can imagine after the comic comes to a close. Stories like "Ingress & Egress" and "An Old Man, Looking" end with such terrifying ambiguity it's hard to be frustrated with the gorgeously-realized results.

There are a few times, though in small number, where the twist endings seem a little vague. For example, one story ends with a character in a mental asylum in the final shot of the webcomic, but the implications of this twist seem to require one or two more panels. Because the protagonist has been in the asylum the entire time, we don't know what's been hallucinated, what's been realized or even what the character looks like. The ending feels satisfying in terms of pace and execution, but abrupt as far as details.

Overall, Split Lip is a great horror comic with plenty of satisfying twist and turns. In a day and age when the cliffhanger endings of many box office thrillers leave us wanting our money back, Split Lip offers a terrifying anthology so engrossing we don't mind reading the tales again and again, even when we know – or don't know – how they truly end.