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Review “Shutter” #1

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Joe Keatinge and Leila De Duca breath new life into globetrotting adventure comics with their gigantic and imaginative world. Kate Kristopher may be bored with the world around her, but from everything we see, she has no reason to be. “Shutter” makes a solid effort to define itself in a genre carved out by timeless classics like The Adventures of Tintin and for the most part it succeeds.


WRITTEN BY: Joe Keatinge
ART BY: Leila De Duca
PUBLISHER: Image
PRICE: $3.50
RELEASE: April 9, 2014

This comic begins by instilling a sense of wonder, adding a sense of bewilderment, and topping it off with a sense of casual complacency. You watch as Kate Kristopher is introduced into a very wild world from an incredibly young age and you’ll be in awe of the universe around her. She lives in a fantastic age filled with weird and marvelous creatures, but she claims her life is boring.

It’s hard to see. She has been on numerous fantastic adventures. The brief glimpses of her exploits that we’re treated too seem more exciting than I could possibly fathom. She’s Johnny Quest but grown up having saw enough to live a thousand lifetimes her world is far from ordinary, but doesn’t seem to faze her anymore.

The looming specters outside of the pages seem to characterize the story more that Kate herself. It’s a beautifully balanced script that shows something missing outside of the primal appeal of adventure, but it’s not quite clear what that something is just yet. It seems rooted in her relationship to her father, but surely there is more to it than that.

Leila De Duca will by all accounts blow you away. Her art is wildly imaginative and pulled off seamlessly. It’s actually quite stunning to see the scope of the world she has created here. Everything is completely outside the ordinary but manages to have a casual complacency about it. You’ll see a spaceman from 50’s science fiction serials sitting on the subway, and a business minotaur in a suit. Only to be juxtaposed by a swash buckling Kate swinging off a sinking ship as its attacked by a Chthulu like monster. It’s hard to fathom, but De Duca makes it look easy.

There is a lot about the power of childhood here on these pages. A child raised in constant danger comes to thrive off of it. They feel lost without it, and that certainly resonates with Kate. “Shutter” will surprise you. It’s not about all the beautiful and fantastic creatures on the page instead it’s an oddly heartfelt look at a woman’s loss of innocence and wonder in a world literally brimming with adventure.

Powerful and exciting with a flavor of the mundane “Shutter” sadly takes its time in this first issue to develop it’s characters and world a little too much without a real focus on what Kate’s story is actually about. For now though, #1 offers a tantalizing tease of the larger world to come.

Rating: 3.5/5 Skulls.

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[Review] Graphic Novel ‘Tender’ Is Brilliant Feminist Body Horror That Will Make You Squirm & Scream

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Tender Beth Hetland Graphic Novel

Beth Hetland’s debut graphic novel, ‘Tender,’ is a modern tale of love, validation, and self-destruction by way of brutal body horror with a feminist edge.

“I’ve wanted this more than anything.”

Men so often dominate the body horror subgenre, which makes it so rare and insightful whenever women tackle this space. This makes Beth Hetland’s Tender such a refreshing change of pace. It’s earnest, honest, and impossibly exposed. Tender takes the body horror subgenre and brilliantly and subversively mixes it together with a narrative that’s steeped in the societal expectations that women face on a daily basis, whether it comes to empowerment, family, or sexuality. It single-handedly beats other 2023 and ‘24 feminine horror texts like American Horror Story: Delicate, Sick, Lisa Frankenstein, and Immaculate at their own game.

Hetland’s Tender is American Psycho meets Rosemary’s Baby meets Swallow. It’s also absolutely not for the faint of heart.

Right from the jump, Tender grabs hold of its audience and doesn’t let go. Carolanne’s quest for romantic fulfillment, validation, and a grander purpose is easy to empathize with and an effective framework for this woeful saga. Carolanne’s wounds cut so deep simply because they’re so incredibly commonplace. Everybody wants to feel wanted.

Tender is full of beautiful, gross, expressive artwork that makes the reader squirm in their seat and itch. Hetland’s drawings are simultaneously minimalist and comprehensively layered. They’re  reminiscent of Charles Burns’ Black Hole, in the best way possible. There’s consistently inspired and striking use of spot coloring that elevates Hetland’s story whenever it’s incorporated, invading Tender’s muted world.

Hetland employs effective, economical storytelling that makes clever use of panels and scene construction so that Tender can breeze through exposition and get to the story’s gooey, aching heart. There’s an excellent page that depicts Carolanne’s menial domestic tasks where the repetitive panels grow increasingly smaller to illustrate the formulaic rut that her life has become. It’s magical. Tender is full of creative devices like this that further let the reader into Carolanne’s mind without ever getting clunky or explicit on the matter. The graphic novel is bookended with a simple moment that shifts from sweet to suffocating.

Tender gives the audience a proper sense of who Carolanne is right away. Hetland adeptly defines her protagonist so that readers are immediately on her side, praying that she gets her “happily ever after,” and makes it out of this sick story alive…And then they’re rapidly wishing for the opposite and utterly aghast over this chameleon. There’s also some creative experimentation with non-linear storytelling that gets to the root of Carolanne and continually recontextualizes who she is and what she wants out of life so that the audience is kept on guard.

Tender casually transforms from a picture-perfect rom-com, right down to the visual style, into a haunting horror story. There’s such a natural quality to how Tender presents the melancholy manner in which a relationship — and life — can decay. Once the horror elements hit, they hit hard, like a jackhammer, and don’t relent. It’s hard not to wince and grimace through Tender’s terrifying images. They’re reminiscent of the nightmarish dadaist visuals from The Ring’s cursed videotape, distilled to blunt comic panels that the reader is forced to confront and digest, rather than something that simply flickers through their mind and is gone a moment later. Tender makes its audience marinate in its mania and incubates its horror as if it’s a gestating fetus in their womb.

Tender tells a powerful, emotional, disturbing story, but its secret weapon may be its sublime pacing. Hetland paces Tender in such an exceptional manner, so that it takes its time, sneaks up on the reader, and gets under their skin until they’re dreading where the story will go next. Tender pushes the audience right up to the edge so that they’re practically begging that Carolanne won’t do the things that she does, yet the other shoe always drops in the most devastating manner. Audiences will read Tender with clenched fists that make it a struggle to turn each page, although they won’t be able to stop. Tender isn’t a short story, at more than 160 pages, but readers will want to take their time and relish each page so that this macabre story lasts for as long as possible before it cascades to its tragic conclusion. 

Tender is an accomplished and uncomfortable debut graphic novel from Hetland that reveals a strong, unflinching voice that’s the perfect fit for horror. Tender indulges in heightened flights of fancy and toes the line with the supernatural. However, Tender is so successful at what it does because it’s so grounded in reality and presents a horror story that’s all too common in society. It’s a heartbreaking meditation on loneliness and codependency that’s one of 2024’s must-read horror graphic novels.

‘Tender,’ by Beth Hetland and published by Fantagraphics, is now available.

4 out of 5 skulls

Tender graphic novel review

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