Blood Train #1 // Review
A group of young Americans are boarding a train in Beijing. They’re a complex group of people en route from one place to another. Things are going to. get a hell of a lot more complicated for them in Blood Train #1. Writer Adam Glass tells a remarkably tight, little one-shot contemporary horror story that is brought to page and panel by artist/colorist Bernard Chang. What it might lack in originality, the one-shot more than makes-up for in style and execution as a group of well-rendered characters encounter a monster on a train in a strange land.
The train departs. A couple of them are on their way back fro mthe bathroom when they hear a sound. It’s the sound of a helicopter. And it’s getting closer. So...why would a helicopter be chasing a plane? The two of them and the rest of the train are about to find out as a few soldiers in full tactical combat gear carrying assault rifles shatter their way into the train. They soldiers don’t seem to care that at least some of the people they are pushing around are American. There’s a good reason for that: there’s a monster on the train and it’s only a matter of time before people start dying.
Glass has only a very limited space to deliver the full complexity of the lives of a few people before the soldiers arrive and the monster emerges. As this is a standard horr-rstyle story, it’s important the the characters are rendered in enough detail early-on that the readers care what happens to them in the course of the story. Glass manages that much with a degree of deft efficiency before the caction really starts rolling. From there it’s a very tight action/horror journey all the way to the back cover.
Chang has the benefit of working in a ver limited space over the course of a very limited space. It’s a tiny canvas for a very graphic horror that plays across the page with great efficiency. The hunt between the monsters and the victims and everyone else has to be carried through with a grand sense of forward momentum as this IS a horror story on a high-speed train. The drama of a group of young Americans running into a lithe, sinister demonoid monster feels remarkably fresh with a grand sense of menace rolling though some remarkably gory moments that are rendered with great style and atmosphere in a world that hits the page with a very moody sense of color.
The truly genius bit about this whole project is that it couldn’t quite be told in any other way. A narrative text-based rendering of the story would slow down the intensity of the action. Any kind of an attempt at bringing the thing alive in video or cinema would get too bogged-down in the scripting conventions of moving or streaming platforms that woud reuqite an entirely different kind of pacing that wouldn’t serve Glass’ script at all. Blood Train is the very pulse of a modern horror comic book.
