W0rldtr33 #15 // Review
There’s grainy surveillance camera footage. There’s a girl named Sammi. She’s in a straightjacket. She’s strapped to a wheelchair. They’re asking her about the man that she killed. She keeps telling them that it wasn’t her who killed the man. She was merely the door that the killer walked through. They ask her to clarify and once again she tells them that the killer wasn’t her...but it will be. Things continue to be more than a bit twisted in W0rldtr33 #15. Writer James Tynion IV and artst Fernando Blanco continue a trippy cyberpunk horror drama with colorist Jordie Bellaire.
Elsewhere, Gabriel Winter has recorded a video for Ellison. As he’s recording it, he’s on a flight to Western Pennsylvania. Earlier-on in the morning, Ellison’s brother killed a few dozen people while under the influence of a malevolent force that lives beneath the internet. There’s a guy watching the video who identifies himself as King Koopa. He speaks into a microphone addressing a whole bunch of people. Says he needs volunteers for a new secret project. Things could start to get a bit more dangerous for a great many people. Koopa doesn’t want to force anyone to volunteer. It’s going to be dangerous.
Tynion places a lot of moods in this particular cloak-and-dagger-style drama. Lots of weird poetry circulates around the edges of everything. And it’s really is just a collection of different moments that don't necessarily feel like they're connecting. A lot of disjointed energies. But it's kind of hard to look away. Like a strange mixtape of different narrations. Different narratives. Different ways of seeing things. And it all except the same story. But it just was, much around the edges of narrative that still seems to be reluctant to reveal itself in any great detail.
Blanco rules with disjointed narrative as best as possible. There are some very intense moments of drama that feel like they're hitting the right way. Perhaps most clever moments happens to be that rendering of surveillance camera footage of a woman in wheelchair straight jacket. The questioning of her. Ther expression on her face cast in the direction of some unknown landscape beyond her present surroundings. Bellaire’s colors are strange and muted with a cool and shadowy feeling about them. The visual sensation of static on a cathode-ray tube with strange ghosts existing just beyond the reach of page and panel.
It's all perfectly fun to bathe in the strange glow of an issue of this series. But it lacks enough coherent, gravity, to really feel all that compelling beyond the surface. Clearly, there's a lot going on beyond the surface. But no one in the creative team seems to be that terribly interested in letting the reader not exactly what it is. That's going on. It all seems to be orbiting around its own gravity. That’s perfectly fine. Everything being presented feels internally consistent. It's just not terribly compelling. It may take a few more issues to feel substantial enough to gain some momentum.
