The Cull #1 // Review
It’s 3:34 a.m. Cleo is already out of bed. She’s been putting little sad faces in black on tiny red flags. Jakey disappeared. (“Missing” posters are strewn all over the kitchen table.) Cleo is heading out to Black Water Beach with a few friends to shoot a movie at a forbidden rock. None of them know quite exactly what to expect in The Cull #1. Writer Kelly Thompson opens a supernatural horror story with artist Mattia De Iulis. It’s the beginning of a dreamy nightmare that will manifest as a five-issue series with stunning visuals and cleverly nuanced characterization.
No one is terribly happy to be heading out to the beach so early. They’re looking for just the right moment on the beach before sunrise when no one else is there. Every one of the six of them is dealing with some kind of stress...even if it’s just being out of the house before anyone should have to get up. Cleo clearly has an agenda for packing her bag the way that she is. None of the rest of them necessarily know what they’re in for as they approach their shooting location in what might prove to be a kind of weird high tide for everyone.
Thompson takes a long, moody moment to firmly establish the group of high school kids who are going to be the center of the story. There’s a clever subtlety about her sense of characterization that stems from a nearly heroic level of trust in the artist to carry across SO MUCH of the mood leading into the story. There’s actually very little dialogue, but each one of the characters comes across with a profound amount of emotional detail in the deliciously immersive world that she’s delivering to the page.
De Iulis’s art is kind of a revelation. There’s a deeply atmospheric amount of detail in every panel. Thompson has decided that it would be best to introduce each character in their own homes. This allows her to allow De Iulis to really carve out everyone’s personalities on the walls of their rooms as they get up to head out to the shoot. It seems a bit too clean at first glance, but there have been a tremendous number of details painstakingly painted into each and every photorealistic panel. De Iulis’s work with lighting and shade develops a remarkable sense of depth. The shadowy darkness of the early morning hour is blasted open at issue’s end.
The Cull is completely unlike anything else on the comics rack right now. It flawlessly engages the emotions on a level that’s kind of difficult to manage with most traditional comics. Thompson approaches the story with a steady and patient hand as the reality of the terror begins to bleed in around the edges of the panel. The richly textured mood of a thoughtfully-rendered ensemble horror story begins to assemble itself in a promising first issue for Thompson and De Iulis.
