Nectar #1 // Review
Salem, Massachusetts. 1837. A man hears a bell ringing and thinks that it might be an opportunity to save a life. After all...this IS the cemetery and it’s possible that someone might not have been completely dead when they were buried. He’s hoping to find someone who might be alive. What he actually finds is...something else entirely in Nectar #1. Writer Jeremy Robinson and the art team of Annapaola Martello and Francesco Francini open a fascinating, new horror with colorist Steve Canon. The strange fusion of the supernatural with the biological it seems to be a really interesting combination in a story that also finds the foundation of an historical setting.
There are a couple of girls who bought a butterfly. Emily reaches out to it as it's resting on her friends shoulder. Maybe she was hoping for it to land on her finger and she's certainly wasn't expecting it to bite her. And her friend tells her that there's no way that butterfly would bite. Nevertheless, there's scratches up and down her finger. She's going to need to see the doctor. Just to make sure that it's nothing. It probably isn't. But it's best to be on the safe side with this sort of thing.
Robinson lays out the primary premise of the series quite well in the first issue. Beautiful, little butterflies scratch people with a toxin that causes them to dance themselves to death. Why would they seek out human beings for this sort of thing? Well, they have a taste for human blood. That's their nectar. They're very simple and very powerful premise that mixes some of them more popular elements of popular horror in a way that feels fresh and new and original. Should be interesting to see where Robinson goes with the story.
The visual aspects of the story bind it to the comic book page quite well. The our team does a remarkable job of delivering the striking visual of the butterflies themselves. A cloud of beautiful monarch like creatures that are flying in swarms. And the knowledge that they're also very, very toxic. The more earthbound nature of the horror drama doesn't quite capture the full reality of what's being brought to the page by Robinson. There's a powerful traumatic element of people being neurologically forced to dance. It's something that only gets revealed in a brief moment towards the end of the issue. But it doesn't have the visual impact that I could. The strange combination of joy and horror at a neurology going awry. Is there something in that but isn't quite brought to the page. But the butterflies are beautiful.
There's a strong sense of potential in Nectar once things really get rolling. And though the one scene doesn't seem quite as powerful as it could, the art team does a really good job of delivering quite a bit of horror and drama to the page just in the faces of the people of the small town. And all of the visuals look more or less perfectly authentic to the era. Nearly every page is laid out and framed in a way of it. It looks very dramatic and dynamic at the same time. It's a very promising first issue.
