Tales of Syzpense // Review
A man attends a funeral for a robot on the sinister island of Southport. The culture there is battered in the history of a robot uprising. There seems to be something around every corner. Elsewhere, there’s an old man who stalks the night. He’s been dealing with the strange and fantastic for a very long time. It becomes apparent that he’s going to need to find a replacement. Two serials begin in the first issue of the new retro anthology Tales of Syzpense. The first is “Les Mort 13” by writer T.P. Louise and artist Ashley Wood. The second is “Dreamweaver” by writer Chris Ryall and artist Nelson Dániel.
The island of Southport has strange tensions shooting through it from various directions. Who is Lady Burlesque, and why does it appear as though she showed up at a robot funeral? Could there be problems brewing in the Metal Cathedral? Refugees from the Bloody Metal Coup search for some kind of peace in that place. Only metal resides there. On the other side of the book, Dreamweaver has arrived on the U.S.S. Midway. The legendary vessel is only a tourist attraction in southern California now. There is a strange cult of tourists who have arrived after hours. Dreamweaver is there to investigate.
Louise’s “Les Mort 13” is weird and mutated enough to feel like it might have been pulled out of some parallel dimension. The retro sci-fi horror fuses brilliantly with a hardboiled detective sort of feel to deliver something truly fresh to the page that still manages to be classy and retro. Ryall’s “Dreamweaver” is a cleverly crafted supernatural hero story that almost perfectly nails the feeling of something that Marvel would have put out in the early Silver Age. At the same time, it kind of seems like something that Steve Ditko would have written back then and then just...kept writing for over half a century as the character continued to age. Many try for something like that. Few manage it with the level of success Ryall manages in the first chapter of “Dreamweaver.”
Wood’s work is beautiful. Sketchy art looks like it’s something out of a 1940s poster. Blacks and reds and grays materialize out of a khaki background. It has the feel of an early 20th-century political cartoon that has been coaxed into telling a story of history that never happened. Dániel’s art feels vividly like something that Marvel would have put out in the 1960s. It’s a bit like John Romita Senior’s work from back then, but with a decidedly brutal look to it. (The blood in the story looks positively ghastly--in a good way.)
The two features couldn’t possibly look much different. The contrast between the two of them makes Tales of Syzspense one of the more unique-looking books to come out so far this year. Both of them seem to have been pulled out of some weird, dreamy, retro corner from a Silver Age that never really existed. It’s fascinating stuff.
