The cover image by Adriana Melo and Dijjo Lima is a smashed family photo, covered in blood and resting on flower blossoms. Hint hint, The Deadliest Bouquet #1, from Image Comics, is about Family and blood.
Indeed, Ringo Award-nominated writer Erica Schultz brings us the blood ties, the bloodiness of the family. It’s 1998, on the day after Valentine’s Day, and there’s a dead body in the flower shop. You see, “mom”, Jasmine Hawthorn is dead.
From there, the family gathers, and the slings and arrows and swearing begin. Cupid has definitely left the building of Les Trois Fleurs and taken his love potion with him. The family gathering is a fencing match, a bait, and switch, a bated-breath-battle that catches our collective breath. If there IS love here, it’s not a good love or at least a well-functioning one. There is little mourning being done.
Italian Artist Carola Borelli draws out the emotions, the poised confrontations, the blossoming and rekindling of old scratches and thorns. It’s a floral and florid nightmare, to be sure. Colourist Gab Contreras contributes nightshades of all hues, enhanced by handfuls of earth tones, flatly and expertly applied. The colour is specific, local, and careful, and fits within Borelli’s precisely lined boundaries. Likewise precise is Erica Shultz’s lettering. James Emmett is Editor.
It all works, it stirs up the soil, it forks great handfuls of mud to sling, it brings family drama together, as messy as it gets. Schultz plants hints, allegations, and seeds of interesting plot developments that we will want to follow. We will want to know if our guesses will bear fruit!
Image, The Deadliest Bouquet #1, $3.99 for 24 pages of Mature Content
Newsdesk