Dark Ride #1 // Review
Somewhere in the past, a gentleman dreamed of a horror-based theme park ride. He couldn’t get anyone to agree to it. Then tragedy struck. There was a murder. Late one night, he was burying the body of his wife when a demonic voice emerged from the grave. Years later, he’s a huge success. Writer Joshua Williamson opens Dark Ride—a supernatural horror series that emerges onto page and panel thanks to the art and design work of Andrei Bressan. Though it lacks any of the subtlety of the best horror stories, Williamson and Bressan’s opening issue holds a charmingly graphic appeal with a great deal of potential.
Arthur Dante had two kids: Samhain and Halloween. Sam looks after the family theme park. Halloween is an attractive horror-based influencer. It’s a really successful family. The horror might seem obvious, but something altogether darker lurks beneath the surface. It should come as no surprise that a guy like that would have started a wildly successful horror-based theme park. The whole accidentally murdering his first wife thing would probably come as something of a surprise to most people, though. And then...then there’s the prospect of very real demons lurking below the surface of everything.
Theme parks are inherently creepy. There’s something very sinister about the nature of a totally fabricated reality that is intended for deeply interactive experiences. Williamson takes the horror of a theme park very literally in the opening issue of the new series, which envisions a dark mutation of Disney. There isn’t a hell of a lot of sinister subtlety in the story that Williamson is bringing to the page. It’s all wide-open. That being said, Williamson’s writing for the opening issues DOES manage an impressively textured variety of ways to deliver the grand tour of the world he will be playing with in the issues to come.
Bressan builds a viscerally believable vision of a horror-based theme park. He’s drawing on a horror-based variation of Disney-style visuals in a way that feels appealingly familiar. The way that Bressan is bringing it to the page, it seems kind of strange that a hugely successful, highly commercial horror-based year-round theme park ISN’T really out there. From the mascots to the Walt-Disney-like deification of the theme park’s founder to the many, many different rides and attractions, Bressan makes it all feel so very, very cozy and familiar with distinct shades of gore and horror bleeding around the edges of the narrative of a fun opening issue.
Williamson might be able to pull off something a lot more disturbing than meets the surface of the series in the first issue. With horror and Halloween imagery lurking around every corner of the page, there might be room for something altogether more frightening as the sanitized, commercial visions of Halloween horror hide something a lot more menacing underneath. Time will tell if Williamson and company can make it work.
