Once your eyes are opened you can never look back.
Creative Staff:
Story: Cullen Bunn
Art: Sally Cantirino
Colors: Dee Cunniffe
Letterer: Jim Campbell
What They Say:
From all-star creators Cullen Bunn (Harrow County, The Last Book You’ll Ever Read) and Sally Cantirino (I Walk With Monsters, Human Remains) comes the story of a motley crew going to battle against supernatural evil throughout the American South.
Perfect for fans of “The Boys,” “B.P.R.D.” and “Proctor Valley Road.”
The Heritage Mills sales team travels from town to town, knocking on doors. They’re the best at what they do… which also means they’re the worst. They’re broken, each and every one of them, haunted by closets so full of skeletons, they’re bursting. When they discover a terrible secret behind one fateful door, it opens their eyes to a world full of real monsters hidden in every small town.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
I’ve talked at length in many reviews of works by Cullen Bunn about a not quite hit-or-miss feeling I get from their works. I’m definitely a fan of what they put out but there’s a good bit of variance with what clicks and that makes me more interested than a lot of other writers because I have no idea what to expect, especially with most of the works learning into the horror side well. For this book, he’s working with the incredibly talented Sally Cantirino who absolutely delighted me with their recent project Human Remains, also from Vault Comics. I adore their style here in how they get into the look of the characters and the kind of weariness to a lot of them combined with such a detailed and lived-in world but without it being hyper-realistic. It’s a land of contrasts that delivers in a huge way for me.
The premise for this one is definitely interesting as we’re introduced to Maxine, a woman who looks like she’s in her early 40s that’s hitching down south and is just on the road. She ends up taking a ride with a group of five that are basically a traveling sales team for a photography company where they go from town to town and work the doors. Max ends up traveling with them to Jenner Hills, West Virginia as that’s where they’re stopping to ply their trade. Each of those in the pickup that are part of it have their own reasons for such a lifestyle as it’s basically constant travel, cheap motels, and late-night drinking in order to make enough money to do it all again the next day. We see through it all that they all have their own stories, though most are just given a cursory nod to establish that they can’t walk the normal world in the same way as other people anymore, but Bunn delivers it in a way that’s concise and effective.
For Max, she’s got a larger purpose here as it turns out, though it wasn’t this town specifically. While she has a brief hookup with one of the guys in the group and rooms with the college student dropout, she picks up the job itself quickly enough to make a few bucks. But she’s drawn back to a boarded-up house late that first night and the others end up going looking for her out of concern, as she made some references to having been a mother. With a number of missing children signs in the town that she’s seen, what’s inside is some sort of demonic creature of a sort that has been killing them in a hidden way. It’s something that Max has had her eyes opened to a while ago and now everyone else has as well, leading to a weird but realistic fight between them and the creature which does manage to get away. It’s a solid setup for saying there’s something dark going on out there and that this weird group of characters may have found a secondary purpose in life that will become their prime purpose.
In Summary:
The approach to this is really good as we spend most of the book getting to know the characters rather than being thrown right into the fire. It’s one of Bunn’s strengths in building tension but it also works really well with Cantirino’s strength as an artist to give us these really humanized characters. The design work for them really is strong in bringing that emotional element to their movements and their expressions and it’s key to knowing who these people are quickly in addition to what’s said out loud. So when you get to the actual moment of action, a baptism by fire for most, their reactions and responses feel honest and earned. I’m really curious to see how far the team can go with this as it has a lot of potential but it’s also just a really solid and strong opening installment. There’s a lot to like here for fans of this kind of horror storytelling as it delivers across the board.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Vault Comics
Release Date: November 16th, 2022
MSRP: $3.99
