Written by: Robert Napton & Seamus Kevin Fahey
Art by: Mann House
Publisher: Image/Top Cow
After reading the concluding issue of Cutter I’m left with the distinct feeling that the creative team simply didn’t have a very solid vision of what they wanted to communicate with the book. I stuck it out through the book’s run with the hope that Napton and Fahey were going to do something to elevate the narrative above standard slasher fare (and I say that as someone that loves standard slasher fare), but, in the end, none of the themes they touch on are fully developed, and the narrative is also, sadly, a bit of a mess.
This issue specifically is bookended by two sequences that just don’t make much sense. At the start of the issue, Jeremy is let out of his jail cell after the killer has taken out every police officer in the building. If we’re to take the reveal of the killer at face value, then this just doesn’t make any sense. The killer we’re given could not have managed this. Then, at the end of the book, we’re given a very strange sequence that is either intended to touch on the theme of bullying that the book has previously approached, or it’s intended to imply something supernatural. A supernatural element would have been fine, except the writers have previously gone out of their way to explicitly to state that there’s not a supernatural element. In addition to these problems, the pacing continues to be very stunted in this issue. I am not sure whether the plot that the writers intended would have been better served by extending the book more, but, as it stands, there hasn’t been any sense of the building dread that is essential to make narratives such as this effective.
The fact that the book touches on themes of bullying and mental health actually proves to be more problematic than it they had just played the whole thing as a straightforward slasher tale. Even the book’s title, Cutter, evokes the idea of self harm, which is used here as a motif without any exploration, rather than coming across as a likely name for this serial killer. The usage of self harm in this manner actually seems somewhat careless. If the writers intended there to be some deeper message related to this, then that meaning has gotten lost somewhere along the way. The message regarding bullying comes across much more clearly. However, I’m not sure if the message that even the most minimal actions that could be considered bullying may be punished with deadly vengeance is really something that adds anything of value to the discussion.
The art, by Mann House, is at its strongest in this issue. Whereas, in the previous issues, there were visual elements that made certain sequences difficult to follow, that difficulty falls mainly on the narrative here. House’s overall aesthetic works well within the horror genre, and I’d be curious to see more of his work, if just to determine whether the visual problems present in previous issues stemmed from general issues with the narrative.
At the end of the day, I could forgive the lack of clear thematic exploration if the narrative itself worked. But the whole series has been oddly paced, lacking in clarity, and just not very scary.
