Reviewed by Taylor Hoffman. Stargazing is almost impossible in urban areas with so much air and light pollution, but in the small mid-western town of Mukawgee, we can glimpse into the space between the stars in UFOlogy #1 (of 6). Here, we experience two narratives of high school kids who just want to be themselves or some sort of normal, though their life experiences are frustrating, confusing, and extraordinary. The expectations from school, parents, and classmates represent pressure from all sides, which immersed me into the book immediately. What really grabbed my attention was the amazing names attached and the clearly supernatural elements. This is not the normal sci-fi book, nor is it strictly horror — it’s fun, shocking, and entrancing. I’m now 100% emotionally invested.
WRITTEN BY: James Tynion IV, Noah J. Yuenkel
ART BY: Matthew Fox
PUBLISHER: BOOM! Studios
PRICE: $3.99
RELEASE: April 1, 2015
As this is the first of six issues, there’s a lot of introduction, but there’s never a boring moment nor is anything exactly as it seems. Does it seem like I’m over-hyping this title? I’m not, this is just one example of what I’ve been craving from comics for years. It’s a story that feels familiar, but takes the paranormal in a new, fun, and heartbreaking direction.
Matthew Fox’s cover transports us to the end of this first chapter, so we start without any context for the dazed girl, scared boy, and strange beam swirling into the sky from a vaguely Victorian house. Foreshadowing can be annoyingly overt, but I didn’t feel that anything was too obvious. Continuing with fantastic art, the first page opens with radio bubbles that are at first obnoxious – “EF-AR-EE-EE-KAY” radio? Sounds awful until you learn who’s behind the microphone. The sky fading from black to the soft pinks and purples of sunset or sunrise spreading over snow and highlighting the locus of our story, a remote small town splattered with multicolored stars swirling above. We’re provided with succinct exposition by the radio host and must decide throughout the book who is the reliable narrator, if there even is one yet.
Our protagonist, Becky, just wants to do things on her own terms like study law and, really, just be left alone. She’s stubborn with a resting bitch-face and it seems outwardly like she has everything and still doesn’t care about anything. Oh, but it’s not the case. Her story runs parallel to the slightly younger boy Finch, a rebel with a past that is inspired by Fox Mulder. These two and a special twist are the core of the story. Without revealing too much, Becky and her not-date explore an abandoned house to find that they are not alone and follow mysterious floating spores. An older man, well, demonic-ish alien, stands in the corner, glows green, speaks in an unrecognizable language, and spreads more spores. Becky is marked by the alien, but it’s “supposed” to be Finch.
Part of Tynion’s genius is his ability to write teenage narratives that are applicable to almost everyone. It’s so much more than teen angst and hormone driven drama. He demonstrates this talent in The Woods. Those essential connections are paramount to what makes his stories work so well. His comics present a reality that’s based in experience and knowledge that growing up is rough; furthermore, struggle to find one’s self is continually confusing and frustrating process. The characters in Tynion’s books are recognizable, they are more developed than the brat pack, yet embracing those seemingly cliché attitudes of those awkward years before what’s always been considered adulthood. I’m excited to see that co-creator and writer Noah J. Yuenkel (The House In The Wall) contributes to this mood so perfectly. It’s obvious that their voices flow together on the same level of the weird. Adam Metcalfe’s colors are surreal blue and pink hues that feels like we’re there, gazing as everything transforms in front of us that makes the uneasiness palpable.
UFOlogy brings weird slipstream fiction to the forefront of modern comics. There’s an evident love of Le Fanu and Lovecraft, the more modern works of China Miéville and Ray Bradbury, and the surge of pop-culture obsession with the paranormal of cult phenomena in the early 1990s with The X-Files and Twin Peaks. Now there are so many questions to be answered. Why here and why now? I want to believe that there is more out there, so now I want to see the proof in the next five issues.
If you don’t like it, well… “sure. fine. whatever.”
—
Taylor Hoffman is the newest member of our comics review team! She likes comics and weird fiction, and can be found on twitter: @taylorcheckers