You Promised Me Darkness #1

You Promised Me Darkness

Behemoth Comics 2021

By Damian Connelly

Lettered by Anabella Mazzaferri

Approximately every 75 years, Halley's Comet orbits around the sun, and every time this happens people around the world are born with incredible abilities, special auras that grant them with supernatural skills, but those auras can also be cursed. Yuko and Sebastian, two siblings with special auras are constantly running from an evil being, known as the "Anti-everything," who feeds from these special auras, getting stronger with each intake. This being is obsessed with these brothers' auras and will not stop until he feasts on them.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this but knowing Behemoth and how much i’ve enjoyed their titles thus far I knew this was something I wanted to read. I’m glad that I did too because this is weird, good weird and weird weird. It is at times hard to read with the narration being so crazy but that is exactly what makes this so damn good. I really would have slapped our intrepid narrator if they were talking to me in person it’s that maddening and yet at the same time who can turn away or put the book down? Not me that’s for sure.

I am kind of into 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 extremely well. It is completely unorthodox and it does feel like English isn’t the first language of the narrator so the appeal for the reader raises exponentially. The character development is interesting as it is being told with such enthusiasm of either a child or a person with dementia and in this instance it’s more or less take your pick. The pacing is superb and as it takes us through the pages revealing this world and the story it catches you in its kung-fu grip and doesn’t let go.

I like how this is being structured and how a seemingly fractured mind is able to weave the layers into the story almost as if someone with ADD goes off track and finds his way back again. The way that everything is able to work together to create story’s ebb & flow as well as move the story constantly forward is really nice to see.

The interiors here are bold, dynamic and unapologetic! My instinct was to see this and think of the wood block carving where you roll your paint the carved block and transfer that to paper it’s that kind of bold black. The composition within the panels is marvellous and how that brings us depth perception, this sense of scale and that 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 remarkable eye for storytelling. The creativity and imagination that we see is stellar stuff and the detail work that manages to be created for it makes the body shiver with both delight and tad bit of fear.

This is one of those books that you have to read several times before you really get to see all the subtle nuances that it has. The premise of the story itself is fantastic and that Haley’s Comet comes along and leaves pieces of itself on earth to turn average folks into extraordinary humans is one that I rather like. That we see some of these being studied and vivisected and all that jazz is just a reminder of what mankind tends to do to those they don’t fully understand.

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So if you are looking for something out of the ordinary that has some intense storytelling and characterisation alongside some dynamic interiors than this really is the one for you.