I think it’s safe to say that horror is my favourite genre.
I love mysteries and crime tales. I’m a huge fan of science fiction, from hard to space opera. I can’t say no to a good western, though I prefer them bleak or weird. And there’s no permutation of fantasy that I’d turn down. But my heart beats for horror. The scares and thrills got me as a kid and they never let go.
I don’t need to fancy it up. I don’t need to make excuses for it. I love horror. From the cheesiest no-budget b-movie to art house mindbenders to the big budget blockbuster. It doesn’t need to be called something other than it is to be worthwhile. A label like “elevated horror” or side-stepping the genre by saying it’s something else that “has horror elements” need not be used. It doesn’t have to be something other than horror in order to tell a good story with meaning. I’d argue that this is one of the very purposes of horror, holding up a mirror to our world to see the darkness and potentially correct it. Like all good fairy tales and fables of old.
But it’s also okay when it’s just a balls-out creature feature.
“Anything can be fixed, son. It’s just a matter of having the right glue and a whole lot of patience.”
Redfork by Alex Paknadel, Nil Vendrell, Giulia Brusco, and Ryan Ferrier follows an ex-con as he gets out of jail and tries to put his life back together in the small coal mining town of Redfork, West Virginia. While dealing with family issues, an accident occurs in the town’s primary mine and an ancient evil is released. Wacky hijinks ensue.
There are interesting levels of morals and ethics going on in this story. Of loyalty to family, of secrets left hidden that might tear things apart, of blame, of addiction, and of how you deal with those issues. It’s fairly bleak, spotlighting not only the decay of coal mining in the Appalachians, but of the horrible effects that it has on the community as it decays. There’s a parallel between two of the families of how lies can be used to harm or protect. Tossed into that is a stranger who comes up out of the mine, offering healing to everyone in the community, but it comes at a fairly nasty price.
The artwork from Nil Vendrell and Giulia Brusco captures the grittiness of the community incredibly well and the descent into body horror and more. Vendrell’s style is a bit reminiscent to me of Rafael Albuquerque, squared off and scratchy characters, nicely textured shadows, but with a bit more of a tendency towards tendrils. Brusco using a darker colour palette, with darker hues of blue, red, green, and brown as a base, capturing the decay of the town and an off-putting, almost sickly eeriness to it.
The book is rounded out with letters from Ryan Ferrier, who gives a nice unique world balloon to one of the characters when the turn towards transformation into something else is complete.
“Sometimes it’s our scars that hold us together, Noah.”
The fun thing about Paknadel, Vendrell, Brusco, and Ferrier’s Redfork is that the horror is insidious. It has a pleasant and helpful face. It offers solutions to your problems. And seemingly makes everything better. Something exceedingly attractive in a town beset by the corporate heartless evil of the coal mining industry. It reminds you that a quick fix might help in the short term, but it could well be deleterious in the long run. Your soul, your very humanity, could be lost.
It makes you think that maybe taking the long route, working through your demons, accepting them and not trying to erase them, could be the best way forward. Or it could just be a great monster story about a corrupting evil that turns folks into cancer-demons.
Classic Comic Compendium: REDFORK
Redfork
Writer: Alex Paknadel
Artist: Nil Vendrell
Colourist: Giulia Brusco
Letterer: Ryan Ferrier
Publisher: TKO Studios
Release Date: November 1, 2020
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