Willy's Wonderland #1

Willy’s Wonderland #1

American Mythology Productions 2021

Written by SA Check & James Kuhoric

Illustrated by Puis Calzada

Coloured by Emmanuel Ordaz

Lettered by Natalie Jane

Hey Kids! Do you know what time it is? It's your birthday and we want you to have Fun! Welcome to Willy's Wonderland! The surprise hit horror flick of 2021 is Willy's Wonderland! Nicolas Cage unleashes a can of Punch Pop on the Willy's serial killing animatronic crew in the film, but what came before the janitorial rampage? Find out here in this official prequel to the movie giving you all the party filled blood spatter you can handle! Willy, Ozzie, Arty, Cammy, Tito, Gus, Sara, and Knighty Knight all are back with a blood soaked romp through homicidal birthday parties!

This is what happens when you mix Chuck E Cheese and Chucky the doll. You get this crazy made for SyFy film prequel series. I mean this is some crazy arse messed up stuff and with the recent Banana Splits film it makes complete sense for this to come out as well. It really is the stuff of nightmares, possessed animatronics that kill and eat people while in the guise of a children’s party palace kind of place yeah there’s nothing already inherently creepy going on there. Concept wise Halloween is completely the right time of year for this hit shelves.

I am very much enjoying 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 exceptionally well. The character development that we see through the narration, the dialogue, the character interaction as well as how we see them act and react to the situations and circumstances which they encounter fleshes out the characters extremely well. The pacing is excellent and as it takes us through the pages revealing the story only makes me want to see and know more.

I like how we see this being structured and how the layers within the story begin to emerge and grow. How we see the layers within the story open up new avenues to be explored we see some great depth, dimension and complexity being added 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 incredibly well achieved.

The interiors here are interesting. I do wish the linework would be a lot sharper and a lot creepier instead of this more traditional comic book style work, but this is my preference for what I wish we’d see. The more traditional style does work in keeping the animatronic characters more authentic and showing less emotion and just getting on with the business of killing makes it creepy on its own account. We could also use more backgrounds in use but then again how we see the composition within the panels brings out the depth perception, sense of scale and the overall sense of size and scope to the story. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels show a solid eye for storytelling. The various hues and tones within the colours being utilised to create the shading, highlights and shadow work shows a great understanding of how colour works.

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This is a lot more fun than I was expecting to see. There is a lot more going on here than meets the eye and there’s definitely some shading dealings happening and it all promises to play out in some wonderfully unexpected ways. The opening here could’ve been a bit better like why the first page was what it was and its significance to the story, the homeless well that speaks for itself really. So for a crazy wacky slice ‘em and dice ‘em good time look no further than a stop at Willy’s Wonderland!