Broken Frontier

For many kids, attending a new school can bring about feelings of loneliness and isolation. Just imagine how much worse starting a new school is if you’re dead.

Today is the first day that the brand new Deltski School is open. Children flood the hallways, but Lindsay Buckner is just a little different from the rest of the kids. She’s dead and rumored to be buried underneath the brand new school. Now, she haunts the halls, trapped within the walls of the school, with little recollection of her past and completely unseen…by everyone except the faceless monsters who are trying to take the last thing she has. Her soul.

Brian Defferding offers up an intriguing story, with an equally compelling and disturbing concept. By drawing parallels between Lindsay’s unique dilemma (being a ghost) and a universal concept (the first day of school), Defferding provides readers with an engaging entry point to an otherwise unknowable concept. He also leads in with a strong prelude, as well as another disturbing contrast, as Lindsay describes to readers her undead perception of the living world with a childish innocence. Despite these successes, Defferding’s writing for the title still needs to find a little more balance. I’m under the impression that his passionate and angry second half of the title was intended to create a another contrast with the eerie, calm of the opening segment, but I found some of the material a little too mature to be coming from a third grader. Lindsay’s profanity laced outburst at the living and ruminations on her first kiss made her seem too worldly, taking away from the real terror of the title– the fact these events have happened to a child.

Defferding’s art has many of the same strengths and weakness as his writing. At a glance, his art style didn’t appeal to me, but I found that he has a very good eye for portraying body language and facial expression. Similarly, his rough style forces the halls of Deltski School to take a "not quite right" perspective that suits the subject matter well. A heavy use of black inks does provide a certain oppressive mood, but at times unfortunately obscures the dominant action of the panels. One of Defferding’s most interesting style decisions (portraying the living with their eyes stitched shut) suffers from this occasional inability to cut through the darkness.

School: A Ghost Story isn’t a great comic– and the subject isn’t one that will appeal to every comic book fan. Despite this, Defferding shows a great deal of potential and promise as a sequential artist and storyteller. He has all of the raw elements to create great comics, and it should be interesting to watch as he gains more experience and polishing to his work.

A 9-page preview of School: A Ghost Story #1 can be found at the artist’s website, http://www.deftoons.com/school.html