Gabe didn’t get a whole lot of sleep last night. He NEVER gets a whole lot of sleep, but...he didn’t sleep really well last night, either. He just kept following links down half-broken, half-built websites until he went through the bottom of the internet and came out the other side...and found himself in a completely different place. It was like...an internet from a completely different world. It’s hard for him to explain what he saw, but he’s going to try in W0RLDTR33 #4. Writer James Tynion IV continues a late 1990s cyberpunk horror with artist Fernando Blanco and colorist Jordie Bellaire.

Silk’s colleague is telling her about how he’s felt since they saw a naked lady gut a woman in Pasadena. He’s had nightmares. Just moments after he’s told Silk about this...a naked woman attacks him with a knife. Silk pulls out her gun, but it’s too late. The woman’s already opening fire on her and talking about what they’re building. It’s something new. It’s something special. Silk isn’t going to be there to see it. The naked woman with the gun tells Silk that she will be dying for a better world. 

There are several thematic layers to Tynion’s story that work on a whole bunch of different levels. Tynion seems to have heavily modified an idea that would have come across like a particularly cheesy horror story from the mid-1990s and fused it into something else entirely. On one level...it’s just kind of a rip-off of the basic premise behind The Matrix, which was itself a rip-off of a LOT of cyberpunk sci-fi. There’s a bit more going on in the series than that, though. Tynion plays with cheap cyberpunk horror shards and fragments and puts them together to form a weird coming-of-age drama about people who have already come of age.

Blanco’s layouts are interesting. So much of the issue is laid out on prison-like 12-panel grids. Every now and again, things get a little out of control, and the page opens up. When it opens up WIDE...that’s when the horror really hits. There are some nuanced bits of drama as well. Bellaire paints a wash over everything. There’s a pretty orange hue to the flashback that opens the issue. Dark things happen in darkness as some contemporary scenes take place with a heavy wash of blue. There’s a drabness to it all that occasionally splashes with red. Red seems to be the color of life that Bellaire is working with. It’s in the hair of a couple of the heroes. Sometimes, it splashes out across the page as well. Bellaire’s blood spatters and stains feel disturbingly real on the page. 

And now we know the name of the naked woman. She once was a sweet little girl named Samm. And we also know how she got twisted into doing what she’s doing. So, in a sense, the fourth issue is a bit of an origin story for her, but there’s still so much more mystery that Tynion hasn’t quite delivered on. For the time being, it’s a fascinating mystery.

Grade: A