It’s moving day, but Dad is drinking beer at the local bar while Mom packs the boxes.
It’s the start of a new comic series from Image, and it’s The Closet #1.
Writer James Tynion IV keeps the ratchet on the tension and cranks up the bad feels. You see, Thom and Maggie are husband and wife at odds. The bad vibes are even worse for their young son, who imagines a monster hiding in the closet.
Artist Gavin Fullerton draws this dark tale, the shadows creeping, the creepiness creeping in with little creepy feelers. The lines are rendered thickly, the large shadow areas arranged in good shapes, totally readable, and nicely balanced. The panels fly by, many silent, making this a quick read.
Chris O’Halloran colours the book with nighttime source lighting. The bar, the apartment, and so on tend to be flat yellow/orange and blue, with very little ‘local‘ colour. in other words, all the faces are orange, the floors are purple and orange, the figures are black, and so on. Not realistic, instead, generalized atmospheric mood colour.
Anyway, enough about colour and the ink tones… and more about the story. The setting and intro, the early moments that set the tone for this creepy tale, it’s all good. But when the main male character, Thom, opens up his heart in the first few pages, he is clearly a bit of a mess. Without revealing too much here, Thom is not a great guy.
And unfortunately, now that we’ve shared a beer or three with him, we don’t like Thom very much. And again, that’s not encouraging us to care about the Thom family; except for the boy. But that perhaps all the nursery rhymes and bedtime fables in the world won’t keep the creepy closet closed for long, and all the bad actors from the rabbit hole will come hopping out, causing even more anguish for the family, moving around in turmoil.
Image Comics, The Closet #1, $3.99 for 30 pages of content. Mature
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