“Backlash”
Creative Staff:
Story: Cullen Bunn
Art: Mark Torres
Colors: Mark Torres
Letterer: Dave Sharpe
What They Say:
In the heart of the Trellux Institute, an unearthly power is awakening.
As their numbers dwindle, as their psychic abilities threaten to kill them, as a vicious murderer stalks them from the shadows, a group of gifted individuals discovers the terrifying truth about their powers.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Cullen Bunn has definitely built this book up nicely with what it wants to do and be, though part of me wishes that it was twice as long so that it could linger and savor various subplots and reveals more than it’s been able to. At the same time, I keep wishing that I could control myself enough to wait until the trade to read his works but, as I’ve learned from his other projects, I enjoy the monthly release far too much to pass it up. Mark Torres has definitely delivered here in crafting the creepy and disturbing in a way that reminded me of The Thing when it came to the end of the previous issue but also hitting some really great notes in the beings that this group sees and communicates with. The mood and atmosphere is positively chilling.
With this issue closing out the series, it plays out as a final act pretty well in making some additional reveals and then wrapping things up in a good way. With the focus on Trellux and what happened there decades ago, the couple of survivors that are left – of this group, as it turns out – have now been brought into the facility itself and it’s here that we discover that what they have is basically the alien thing that crashed all those years ago. It’s been asleep all this time but it’s been having nightmares because of its connections to these humans as everything they’ve felt has been sent back to it. But the reveal of how Trellux scientists basically took tissue from the alien and inserted it into the young brains of these folks when they were kids to give them abilities is just disturbing. They clearly don’t take it well at all and it’s awful to see how they try and cope with it.
Of course, the folks that exist within Trellux that have been dealing with this don’t care much about the kids that have become adults at this point so the whole situation gets dangerous, and the remaining group is certainly worried themselves because they’ve seen enough of the things in their head explode into the creature. But it takes a kind of surreal turn with what Jessica is able to do – after being shot no less – in basically turning the things inside of them against where it came from originally so that they go after it instead of the couple of people. It’s one way to deal with the giant alien problem, though one suspects Trellux has enough that they can do in general with the decades they’ve had with it, but it does help to save those others that were experimented upon even if Jessica herself is still basically broken from this whole experience while being free of immediate danger.
In Summary:
Phantom in the Scan is certainly open to more material from here that could follow the survivors here or work with others elsewhere and I’d certainly be game. But what we get is also fairly complete in telling this particular tale and bringing the main story to a close in a solid and engaging way, though it is mostly “third act” action style material for a lot of it. It has a good flow to the script and the dialogue definitely works well for me and I really love the visual design of this series as Torres delivered beautifully in crafting something that feels weirdly auteur cinematic in style. This was definitely a fun series and one that will work really well in a trade collection with a single-session reading for a first experience or a repeat experience.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: AfterShock Comics
Release Date: September 1st, 2021
MSRP: $3.99
