Slasher’s Apprentice #1 // Review
Riley is a few episodes into a podcast. She’s responsible for Knife Life--a podcast dedicated to analyzing the nature of serial killings. It’s a pretty gruesome hobby, but it’s about to become a bit more than just that in Slasher’s Apprentice #1. Writer Justin Richards and artist Val Holverson open-up an interesting premise in an issue the takes its time in establishing the basics. Color comes to the page courtesy of Rebecca Nalty. It’s a fun opening to a potentially interesting series that could go down a whole bunch of different intriguing paths as it moves from issue to issue in the near future.
Riley has been studying the situation with slashers a lot. She has a lot to offer the listener with respect to the prospect of trying to survive an encounter with a killer. What she can offer one end of a serial killing relationship, though, she can certainly offer the other. And she really DOES want to aid her favorite at-large killer in their exploits as a murderer. It’s a kind of a strange offer and there’s no telling what might happen, but Riley certainly wants to be the apprentice to The Hopton Valley Killer. How difficult could it be hanging out with a serial killer?
Richards explores quite a few different angles that are common to horror. The world in which the story seems to exist, suggest that it might be a world without traditional psychopathology. There are certain things that are comment to serial killers that might not necessarily fit into a slasher movie genre. Complexity of somebody who would go about killing people doesn't seem to be embraced in the first issue. However, this IS only the first issue and there's no telling where from here.
Halvorson’s art has a very clean line style, but feels very pure and well articulated. The messy sketchiness of the life of a serial killer is shun in favor of something that feels a lot more neon and graphically appealing.Nalty’s colors cast themselves across the page in a way that feels very fresh and appealingly luminescent in its own way. The visual aspect of the series really does a good job in selling the overall premise and the overall mood of a darkly directed murder narrative. Granted, some of the more gruesome aspects of the art come across is being kind of silly. But this is embracing sort of the B grade movie horror seems to be inspiring the overall premise of this series.
It is entirely possible that The Slasher’s Apprentice could become a much more complicated look at the psychological nature of serial killing, and that sort of thing. However, it could also go in a direction of being sort of dark absurd comedy as well. It's kind of difficult to tell whether or not it's going to go one direction or the other. Regardless, it seems fascinating enough that it will be fun to see where it goes in the next couple of issues if nothing else. Theoretically, it could straddle the line between comedy and serious horror/psychodrama. So it will be interesting to see where Richards and Halvorson take it next.
