Man-Eaters: The Cursed #1 // Review
After an extended period away, satirical revolutionary hero Maude returns to the comics page in the first issue of another Man-Eaters series brought to the page by writer Chelsea Cain and artists Lia Miternique and Kate Niemczyk. Color comes to the page courtesy of Rachelle Rosenberg. Cain’s satire sinks into a more profound horror with the first issue of a whole new series. Cursed appears to be a darker look at the path to adulthood in those spaces beyond the comfort of technology and gentle the reassurance of parental authority.
Maude’s parents are trying to reconnect. (They’ve been through a lot.) They’re going out to a special, little getaway for the two of them. What will they do with the 16-year-old Maude? Well...she’s being sent off to Craft Camp. (It’s okay. She’s been there before.) She doesn’t want to have to go there. (She sleepwalks, and there are no electronics allowed. And besides: she’s already very accomplished at the camp, having essentially achieved its highest honor.) She wants to spend the summer watching a few seasons of Hannibal on her laptop. Instead, she’s going to have to face night terrors and the strange horror of a campground where adults never tread.
The teenaged Maude makes an admirable stride across page and panel as Cain sets up another series of Man-Eaters. The social satire is firmly in place in the foreground of the series in clever ways as Maude, and her fellow campers are placed into nature in a way that is paradoxically unnatural. Everyone wears pins denoting their particular allergies and issues. The sense of organization is overwhelming, but even an over-achiever like Maude has to deal with deeper concerns that may reach further into her psyche than she might want to venture. It’s deliciously textured stuff. Once again, Cain mixes clever satirical observations with dark, coming-of-age horror.
The visual reality of Man-Eaters is appealing as ever. Maude seems just a bit more heroic and quite a bit more confident than she did in the previous series. Delicate subtlety plays across her face in an environment that feels very immersive. As with the previous series, Cain allows the art team to punctuate the sequential art with additional materials, including an online listing for the romantic getaway that Maude’s parents will be heading off to and Maude’s somewhat exhaustively detailed summer camp registration form. There are even a couple of pages of color-coded camp buttons for campers labeling them as everything from “Left-Handed” to “Picky Eater” to “Socially Awkward.”
It would have seemed like there wouldn’t have been a whole lot of ground for Cain and company to cover after the first series. Rather than trying to repeat the successes of the first series, Cain. And company are valiantly leading Maude in a totally new direction as she navigates her way through adolescence. The summer camp format might have been a bit more cleverly placed in a quick-moving series scheduled to run the length of a single summer, but every other aspect of the series seems to be more or less perfectly placed at the end of the first issue.
