Written by: Ray Fawkes
Art by: Ray Fawkes
Publisher: Image Comics
When one thinks of cosmic horror—Lovecraftian horror—one doesn’t normally picture water colors and child-like drawings. No, one is more apt to picture cyclopean structures and tentacles painted realistically in Photoshop. I know this because my desktop wallpaper at work cycles between such images.
For all its talk of unthinkable, most depictions of cosmic horror are really quite clean and easy to follow. The monsters are disturbing, but they have form.
Underwinter says no to that. It’s probably better for it…? Certainly this book is more unsettling than any horror comic I’ve read in recent memory. The mood is dark and distorted, the monster is bizarre and distorted, and the people are flawed and distorted. It’s a wonderful style that I gave much praise to when I reviewed issue #2, and really, the praise remains.
That being said, accessibility isn’t a bad thing, ya know? Underwinter is probably scarier than The Hunt, but only after you really look at the pages and figure out what’s happening. It’s a puzzle, and sometimes that adds tension, and sometimes it just adds confusion. The Hunt is never confusing, and the monster design is better too.
But I do love the idea of, “your mind can’t comprehend it, so this is what you see.” It’s a common theme in Lovecraft’s work, but the actual execution doesn’t work as well with words as it does with drawings, even if the drawings are hard to follow. Lovecraft handwaved some of his monster designs with the fear of going crazy (that and the man wasn’t great at descriptions), whereas Underwinter just embraces the abstract. There’s nothing inherently scary about tentacles, but vomiting glass is goddamned horrifying no matter where you are.
As to plot, Underwinter #3 is more character focused, but even that’s distorted. The last issue made note that violence was on the rise and people were acting out of character. So, are these characters just more flawed than we thought, or are they also caught up in whatever cosmic horror is stirring in the background? Corben’s the only one who has any inkling of what’s going on, and he’s losing his mind.
Lovecraft says hello.
Conceptually, the whole thing is brilliant, though in execution and practice, it’s a bit less compelling than the previous two issues. Part of that is the artwork, I think. There are pages that are harder to follow than they maybe need to be given the context. The rest is the aforementioned character distortion. We got tastes of who these people are in the first two issues, but getting a look at them while they’re degrading (maybe?) doesn’t add much to them because I still don’t know enough about them. I don’t know if what they are doing or enjoying is par the course or not. I don’t know how to react to it.
It would help if they were more introspective, maybe, but they aren’t.
That being said, the issue is great. It’s got that skincrawling tension of the first two in spades, and the one “action scene” is wonderful in Fawkes’ art style. I hope we see more blood, because these water colors suit it well.
