Red Room #3

Red Room #3

Fanatgraphics 2021

By Ed Piskor

Levee Turks was an encryption software prodigy serving a life sentence for creating an online drug empire, until the FBI proposed a deal: infiltrate red rooms and help the FBI crack down on these deepest corners of the dark web. But Turks soon finds that prison might be a better fate... Another killer stand-alone issue of the all-new monthly series from the creator of Hip Hop Family Tree and X-Men: Grand Design! As seen on Piskor's YouTube channel sensation, Cartoonist Kayfabe!

This is one of the sickest, most disgustingly fascinating books you’ll ever read. Maybe is is due to the fact that we’ve become so desensitised to violence and the affect that it has overall or maybe we just crave something that will test the limits and boundaries of what we find acceptable or despicable is up in the air at this point but either way you look at it this is what we crave nowadays. We’ve all heard the Dark Web is home to all sorts of depravity that there is and can you even really police a place like this? From snuff films to child pornography to the buying and selling of drugs, people and anything you could possibly imagine it’s all supposed to be there.

This issue changes up how 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 exceptionally well. The character development that we see through the dialogue, the character interaction as well as how they act and react to the situations and circumstances which they encounter helps to the flesh the characters out extremely well. The pacing is superb and as it takes us through the peages revealing more and more of the story we find ourselves more and more interested in what’s happening.

The way that we see this being structured and how the layers within the story continue to emerge, grow, evolve and strengthen is extremely nice to see. The layers are where we see the characterisation, the plot twists and so much more and whether they work with the main arc or simply swirl around it they all add depth, dimension and complexity to the story. How we see everything working together to create the story’s ebb & flow as well as how it moves the story forward is impeccably achieved.

I’m still super impressed with the way that we see the interiors. The linework is utterly exquisite and how the varying weights and techniques that we see being utilised to create this level and quality of detail work is staggering. The creativity and imagination that we see on display is phenomenal. That we see backgrounds utilised as we do is fantastic and 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 of the story. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels show a masterful eye for storytelling. There is something about the paper colour that works so well with this story and so well with the pen & ink style.

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I love the way that we see this being told. With Levee and his girlfriend and learning what we do while the FBI is being a bunch of dicks about everything but it all plays together perfectly. I know that this is supposed to be a stand alone story but I want to see this arc taking centre stage throughout the series for a while because it just makes this brilliant kind of sense. This is finally when we start to see someone so incredibly offended by what they see that they are fully on board with finding a way to shut em down. I’m loving this book more and more the more we see of it. It is so well written with such amazing creativity and imagination and mindbogglingly brilliant interiors.