Image Comics brings you a fantasy graphic novel about a girl born with some dangerous powers which makes her an evil monster to the people in Kroma. So if you want to learn something about the difference between colors, then this is it. Well first of all this isn’t just an ordinary comic, but it also goes without saying that the story is about the survival of the fittest. Even so, this is what makes the color palate shines in this comic because all the characters are pale, except one of them who has colors of their eyes which is very eerie, to begin with. The comic is created by Lorenzo De Felici, he’s a comic book artist and cover artist from Italy who worked as a colorist on Bonelli’s comic series Orphans and on the covers of Lukas and the special issue on Dylan Sog n337 “Spazio Profondo”, and he’s also a co-author with Robert Kirkman on Oblivion Song by Skybound.
The front cover shows something about how graphic design really shines. You see a pale girl colored in a grayscale color that he chose. I’m not racist, I’m just seeing what it is because, in most of the story, you’re going to see a lot of people in this comic colored in a grayish form. So the girl is staring at you with her green eyes, and the background shows that he colored the whole flowers. So I guess that he focuses on coloring the backgrounds and the animals but not the humans. At the back of the cover, there’s a quote written by Robert Kirkman who quoted “ Everyone should be lining up to watch Lorenzo De Felici stretch his wings and FLY.” I mean where’s the concept with that, does this has anything to do with the story? Anyway, I haven’t told you the story yet, because this comic has gotten real.
The story starts with a cute colored bird flying around with a gorgeous background of the forest until the bird is attacked by some vicious-looking Tulcan Sam from Fruit Loops and killed the bird. The boy just startled at a dead colored bird with a lot of blood, because somehow the color actually scared him. Not only are people like him who are colored in black and white, but the whole town is all gray. It’s an interesting concept that the artist chooses to color the society in black and white because whenever I kept turning the pages to know what comes next, every other character’s actions and the atmosphere of the town are all black and white. A boy named Zet is taking his group of friends to see some ceremony where a monster is born coming out of a black egg which is too random to begin with because it looks like nothing but a huge egg-shaped boulder. And inside of the egg hatches a girl dressed up as a crocodile with bones. As the ceremony started, everyone who attended the ceremony started to beat up that girl. I don’t know what’s the point of that festival, is it trying not to let the people get corrupted by a cursed girl or something? At the time when Zet looks into her eyes, he gets the illusion of some woman who is being tortured.
The next scene is where Zet started to see the prisoner who calls a monster because somehow he saw something that intrigues him. But somehow when he sees the girl after she stepped on the moonlight, her eyes are colored green and blue which makes her a monster out of nowhere. So the plot of the story goes about how people used to live in harmony with the King of Colors which has the power to create life in color as in the rainbows, nature, the sun, well probably how the four season has created. But then someone thinks that the color is bullshit and created a new one that made the king feel furious and sent some monsters to hunt them down, and then the same man who created a color learned how to escape the plague and created a pale city which is colored in black and white just to keep everyone safe from the lizards.
And after all of that, the world has a set of rules because the color is really bad for pale people, but then all of a sudden there are some giant crocodiles who are going out looking for blood and eating them. It’s really hard to explain to follow the story because most of these things make no sense on how the coloring is bad for the pale people, but one of them actually cares because he kept seeing the girl named Kroma and shows her the colored forest, right until Zet was stabbed in the back and she went all the way to save him. And after that, every other living thing is trying to kill the Pale people because they can smell the blood. And everything else is that Zet and Kroma are going on a journey to find the answers, Kroma befriended the lizards by placing the blood on her forehead as their eye, and finally, they get the pale people to know the truth that the elder has been lying the whole time. It’s a really interesting tale and somehow the colors have remained to all the people in their hearts for now.
The story is quite interesting as the fact that color is more than anything in general as you learned about the basics of color theory. But you know what’s weird about this story is that people often see the color which is a bad thing, and the only reason I know why is this comic so hooked me is that most of the time when I read this comic, the color isn’t too much to focus on the environment because what the author is going for making this story is that the color is bad to the people so they want to escape it. So that side of the town is completely safe for the people with such a greyscale color. It’s like Dani and Dorian Wytte from Hooky on Webtoon, they’re just some adorable children who are learning black magic and somehow Ms. Miriam Bonastre created them by giving their personas for coloring the children black and white. But imagine if you get Dani, Dorian, and the other witches crammed into the corner of the Pale City, and then if you get outside of the city to the wilds, now you’re reading Attack of Titan where every other giant is trying to kill you, but except the Titans, it’s colorful monsters out there. And as for the background, now you’re reading Luna on Boom! Studios with such an awesome colorful background that Maria Llovet has developed with so much detail.
Well, at least I got his art style out of the way, because everything is all colorful and stuff and it was a fucking mindblowing experience. Overall, it’s still a good comic, because I never thought that there’s a story that is focused on whether the color is good or bad. Reviewing this comic would be like going over the principles of color theory and trying to understand why color is important to us. And somehow, we learned a valuable lesson about coloring.
Newsdesk