Broken Frontier

When I sat down to read Crawl to Me, I had just taken a big bite out of a ham and turkey sandwich with white American, avocado spread, and a thick tomato slice – the perfect meal to satisfy me after a long day where I had to skip lunch. The story was so gripping that I hadn’t even taken a second bite out of my sandwich by the time I was done. But when I looked at it afterward, the meat on the sandwich covered in the gooey red insides from the tomato vividly reminded me of countless dead bodies littered across a pedophile’s lawn. Let’s just say that I didn’t finish the sandwich.

Alan Robert – famous for being the bassist and songwriter for rock band Life of Agony, and his previous comic series Wire Hangers – writes, draws, and letters a story about a man named Ryan who witnesses a police arrest that ends in the bloody shooting of everyone involved. You might think I just dropped a spoiler, but you’d be wrong. It is what happens next that kicks the book into overdrive and delivers a sequence of horrific imagery.

Robert’s art style creates the perfect complement to his tense writing. The setting is a bleak forested area where Ryan’s skin is as pale as the snow covering the ground and the only thing remotely colorful is his long red scarf. Bursts of color arrive on the page when cop cars barrel down the road and a firefight ensues off in the distance. Robert makes the bright pinks and oranges linger in the air as if the reader is under a drug where light doesn’t behave how it should. He also uses light to illuminate a cop’s sunglasses to make him appear more like a demon than a man. If insanity could be visualized, it would no doubt look similar to the pages of Crawl to Me.

Another highlight of the issue is Robert’s sound effects. The barks of Ryan’s dog, the shots fired from many guns, and the insane laughter of the pedophile are all ingrained into the art to add an engaging element to each visual. With so many sounds slapped on afterwards by a letterer as is done with a majority of other comics, the expert use of them here is a welcome change.

Reading this issue reminds me of Joshua Fialkov’s recent horror hit Echoes. However, where Fialkov’s heavily medicated psychotic protagonist slowly realizes the terrors he sees might not be reality, Robert immediately pushes his character into the deep end of a frightening pool of madness. Fialkov’s slower burn paid off brilliantly, so it will be interesting to see the direction Robert goes after already showing so much crazy up front. The story is gross and gruesome, yet that’s what makes it great – just don’t try to eat a sandwich afterward.