The creatures are changing things up now.
Creative Staff:
Story: Peter Milligan
Art: Sally Cantirino
Colors: Dearbhla Kelly
Letterer: Andworld
What They Say:
Disparate lives are woven together in this terrifying, new world where strong emotions are hunted by monstrous creatures. While General Sullivan tries to lure the lifeforms into a fight, Jessica finally finds the courage to leave her own domestic monster. Meanwhile, Naresh is about to investigate a community where there have been no attacks…before being delayed by an act of gut-wrenching horror.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
With Peter Milligan stepping out into a number of new books recently and working with several interesting smaller publishers, his work with Vault Comics definitely fits in well with a lot of what they’ve produced over their existence. Milligan has always tapped into the weird well, going back decades, but it’s the underlying humanity that makes his stories engaging, even one like this that introduces a lot of characters. Joining him on this journey is Sally Cantirino, who has done some really solid recently with I Walk With Monsters also for Vault, so getting a new series from them here just makes my day. It looks great as it covers a ton of locations and characters with a big range of emotions – and non-emotions.
The first two issues have laid out a lot of ground and characters, confusingly so at times with what’s going on, but the main focus here really is showing that the creatures that are causing all the death and chaos are changing. We see this in a few ways here, one period where they don’t fall for a trip that the military has set up while another shows them killing a child that is far younger than they generally go for. There’s a real curiosity about the who and why of their kills that I hope gets explained fully at some point but showing that things aren’t quite as clear cut as they have been previously definitely made for an intriguing change. And one that really ups the dangerousness of the whole situation.
A lot of the book focuses on Jess as she’s trying to get away from the cruel man that is her husband but she’s trapped into this life and he’s definitely made it harder for her to leave. She attempts it a few times, especially when we see that he and a few others are robbing places where the owners have gone out of the city to try and ride out the chaos. That has him on a big of a see-saw in how he interacts with her but he is consistently a danger to her. At the same time, we’re seeing Naresh trying to get to Oregon so she can do some real investigating into why nobody has died in a particular area there. It’s interesting seeing her deal with others in trying to manage this while at the same time having her life thrown upside down by the creatures. There’s so much pain and misery going on in this series with little hope that it’s a brutal experience.
In Summary:
Human Remains continues to be a hard series to read with all the death and chaos and the despair of so much humanity. It reminds of a lot of recent years with people just trying to survive and not get caught up in things, to try and ride it out in a stable way, but there are moments where events will cause you to lash out and you simply have to react. But that uncertainty of the monsters and what they do really does leave you on edge and tense to see if they’ll react and how badly. Milligan continues to unnerve in a lot of ways and the artwork from Cantirino continues to capture the perfect look and feel for this kind of story without looking away from the awfulness of it all.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: Vault Comics
Release Date: November 24th, 2021
MSRP: $3.99
