Red Room #1

Red Room #1

Fantagraphics 2021

Mature Readers Title

By Ed Piskor

Red Room is a cyberpunk, outlaw, splatterpunk masterpiece. Aided by the anonymous dark web and nearly untraceable cryptocurrency, there has emerged a subculture of criminals who live-stream and patronize webcam murders for entertainment. Who are the murderers? Who are the victims? How do we stop it?

I love getting surprises in my email and working with various companies gives me the opportunity to find books like this one that I wouldn’t normally find. My local shop doesn’t carry books like this, long story and I need a new shop, and I’d love to work with Fantagraphics even more after reading this. This is a very adult title, there’s nudity, obscene death and murder in the vein of Hostel so be warned. I found myself loving every moment of this, much to my surprise and I think this has a lot to do with Davis and the catalyst that happens with him that makes us feel for him and understand his position in not only life but his desire to exact revenge on those who took away his happiness. It really is very simple, through grief and pain how far are you willing to go to find some sort of happiness in your life once again?

I like the way that this is being told. The story & plot development that we see through how the sequence of events unfold as well as how the reader learns information is presented extremely well. I love the segways from one part to the next and how they all tie into the larger picture here, it has this smooth as silk effect to it that just really impresses me. The character development that we see is superb and from the dialogue, through the character interaction alongside the way the characters act and react to the situations and circumstances they find themselves in really do wonders in fleshing them out as people.

I am enjoying the way that we see this being structured and how the layers within the story emerge, grow and strengthen. Considering this is a one and done issue, the story is one and done, that makes it all the impressive to me as well. How we see everything working together to create the story’s ebb & flow as well as how it moves the story forward is greatly achieved.

The interiors here are bloody gorgeous! The linework that we see with their varying weights and techniques being utilised to create this level of detail in the work is truly astonishing. It is this black & white work on what appears to be more of a manilla style paper and to see how the pen & ink comes to life on it is utterly phenomenal to me. We see backgrounds utilised throughout and they work beautifully to enhance the moments as well as how they work within the composition of the panels to bring out the depth perception, sense of scale and the overall sense of size and scope to the book. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels show a brilliant eye for storytelling. The creativity and imagination here is are off the charts and to be able to come up with the way you can stretch skiing and remove body parts isn’t as easy to render as one might think. It is sick and twisted but damn if it isn’t astonishingly well rendered.

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If you love the slasher style genre of horror with actual solid and interesting writing and characterisation than you are going to go bananas over this. It has this intelligently written story and it brings you to brink of what you might think what’s possible and then leaves at the precipice until you find your footing and get yourself brought down again. It gives you the willies shudders while it thrills you at the same time and there’s no escaping the power of storytelling here.