Image Comics brings you a dark fantasy graphic novel about a survival of the fittest between a man and some monsters in Phantom Road volume 1. So I’m here again reviewing some horror comics because this month is Spooky season. I reviewed some because I like seeing some horror shit as well as violence and gore. This comic however takes place on a road in the middle of nowhere. You might think that this is like The Walking Dead, Courage the Cowardly Dog, or any other series that has a plot about some road to travel. But no, this comic goes to another level of survival of the fittest while you’re on the road. The comic is written by Jeff Lemire and illustrated by Gabriel H. Walta, Jeff is a Canadian comic book writer, artist, and TV producer who has created acclaimed titles such as Essex County Trilogy, Sweet Tooth, and The Nobody. Speaking of Sweet Tooth, it was also adapted as a Netflix live-action in 2021, I do remember the live-action, and it was really exciting and eerie, and I really liked it. Gabriel is a comic book artist who illustrated several titles including Hellboy, Vision and so as Phantom Road. According to his bio, he dedicated himself to children’s illustration and painting after getting his Master of Fine Arts degree, but then he decided to make comics starting with the publisher IDW, after he received the Spanish Injuve award in 2002.
The front cover of the comic is just very plain. And there’s not much to explain here, because there’s one man holding a bloody crowbar, and on the right, you see those monsters that almost looked like the ReDeads from Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time without the faces. I don’t know what’s more to explain, but the background almost looks like a desolate wasteland, and that is the fact that the whole world is completely destroyed in another time. How do I know that? I don’t know it just happens to look like that whenever a big hurricane brewed. I’m just kidding, I haven’t gone through the story yet. I love the quote from Multiversity Comics who wrote “An Incredibly effective visual comic that maserfully creates tone and tension with color saturation and harsh lightning. It’s a road you want to travel down.” It’s true though because imagine if you’re on the road and you see a gorgeous landscape in the countryside, but somehow when a storm goes by the atmosphere changes and somehow it makes you think that you want to make a painting out of it, believe me, I was there traveling on the road with my car in South America a few years ago.
The story is about a trucker who is driving at night, he stops at a gas station to fill up his truck. But then he meets some people who look like zombies by making their faces as if they had never slept. And then back on the road making a long trip to North Dakota for deliveries, he discovered a car accident in the middle of the road which made him turn his truck to the other side. What’s so weird about it is that the woman who is driving the car saw some strange skeleton appear on the road, however, the main character can see it too, once he touches it, it immediately triggers some shit and transported them to another world where everything is destroyed. They saw someone out there and it was some monster trying to kill them, not just one a dozen of those came out of nowhere, and they killed every single one of them.
This is where it gets so random because the story is all about smoke and mirrors. There’s this scene where the main characters enter a fast food restaurant at a gas station, and the female character sees a place where people are still alive and well at night, when she goes outside, all of that isn’t real, she sees that as an illusion. Then they met some creepy dude who was in the bathroom on the first few pages, he explained about what kind of world it is, and it turns out that they’re in another world where everything is destroyed. It’s like a wormhole that creates a tunnel between two distant points in the universe that cuts the travel time from one point to another. The restaurant for example is exactly a wormhole because once she got out after the explanation it got looped to a normal world. I don’t know what kind of logic is this, but this is a really interesting plot. This is really self-explanatory to say that a piece of rock is doing all the work to transport humans to another world where you get attacked by some monsters. I really don’t know what to say, but this is some crazy shit to be called a fantasy, horror comic that I’m reading, and I love it.
I can’t expect any more of the story because that whole wormhole loop thing is just insane. Some say that this is a fantasy genre book, but it also combines with some sci-fi fantasy vibes here. I must say it’s really extraordinary of a storytelling about humans who got involved in another world where they got attacked by some zombies in broad daylight. You don’t see a lot of comics that involve an empty world with monsters around. This comic takes a lot of inspiration from The Walking Dead because most of the scenes are people running away from zombies just like every other horror movie, but this one is just another place where everything is about to kill you. Ok, the art style of Gabriel is really cool, and to be certain I’ve seen a lot of comic artists who started coloring their comics with watercolor lately, including the scene where the two main characters are in another world. The character designs are pretty good, and how they interact is just amazing, and what I really love is how the characters express themselves so differently because no matter how I look at the characters’ faces it makes it very expressional like how they are scared shitless, how they react and sometimes how these characters looked so strange, like the guy with the Hawaiian shirt who explained about what’s happening. The comic is really interesting and horrifying at the same time with a lot of elements to come by. If you rather want to read a comic about a link between two worlds where everything is alive or dead, then this is for you.
Newsdesk