Twilight Zone #4 // Review
The houseboat has a hole in the bottom of it. It’s not...sinking or anything, but it isn’t exactly what the three of them were expecting for their weekend vacation. Chet, his twin sister Laura and her husband are going to have to deal with a pretty dismal rental for the weekend, but there might just be an interesting adventure awaiying them in The Twilight Zone #4. Writer/artist Nate Powell delivers an enjoyable one-shot horror story that feels a little cluttered around the edges. For the most part, though, it is a natural excursion into black and white horror.
Chet’s had problems, but he seems to have surfaced from them. He’s found his people online. Real alphas. So it’s going to be an awkward weekend with his twin sister and her husband. Chet’s getting his life together, but he doesn’t want to talk about getting his life back together. Laura’s still concerned about him, though. Somewhere in the midst of it all there’s this cut out at the bottom of the houseboat. (Laura thought the description of the place online meant a glass bottom cutout. Turns out that it’s just...completely open. And so it seems perfectly natural to just dive into the cutout to explore the water below the boat...
Powell’s script does a pretty good job of establishing the basic elements of the story. The three characters are relatively well-defined. The problem is that there isn't quite enough in the substance of the dialogue to suggest a very strong emotional connection between a reader and story. The three characters in question are people on a vacation. They have connections as a family. There is no strong enough sense of who they are emotionally to really build up much of a cool hearing emotional attachment with them.
Power firmly establishes that the moodiness of the situation. It's a very murky sort of a vacation. That Merkis is brought quite vividly to the page and scenes that are well framed with a very powerful sense of movement. There's quite a lot of shadow on the page. However, there's more than enough crawling in and around the shadow to keep it all visually interesting from beginning to end. The who in the story seems really well-framed. It's just not terribly compelling. There's enough characterization to firmly establish what's going on. But there isn't enough behind that to really make it feel as compelling as it could be.
The problem may lie in the fact that there isn't much going on philosophically beyond the surface level of the horror. The best stories in the.Twilight Zone franchise end up being ones that have some sort of a existential or philosophical and to them. There really isn't much going on here with that. It's really just an emotional connection between brother and sister, and the fact that they're twins. There's an emotional anchor to the drama, but there isn't enough to really make it feel all that compelling once the final panel is reached.
