It’s about that time. The days are getting shorter. The sky is getting darker. The weather is getting colder.
Just in time for Halloween, Dark Horse Comics has released Colder, a psychological thriller written by Portland’s Paul Tobin and drawn by Juan Ferreyra.
The story doesn’t fit into traditional expectations for the horror genre. There isn’t a new breed of serial killer on the streets. There isn’t a creepy cabin that preys on teenage fornicators. There isn’t a mysterious benefactor daring a group of strangers to spend the night in a haunted house.
The title is derived from its protagonist, Declan, who is doomed to get colder every year of his life. With a temperature below 50 degrees, Declan sits in an apartment, mostly motionless, under the supervision of his caretaker, Reece.
A being named Nimble Jack is responsible for Declan’s condition, having cursed him during a fire at a mental institution 70 years prior. Jack is an enigma, a slithering kind of demon that looks like The Joker dressed as the world’s most menacing mime.
We see Jack slinking through the world, invisible to most, eating the souls of the vulnerable and driving them to suicide. In an early scene, Jack slinks into a jail cell and coaxes an inmate into a new belt noose. It’s hard to nail down Nimble Jack; from beginning to end, it’s hard to predict what he will do or even what he’s capable of.
That uncertainty is consistent throughout Colder. Nimble Jack’s return awakens Declan, who whisks Reece away to “The Hungry World,” a parallel dimension that looks like a post-apocalyptic M.C. Escher painting. In an effort to escape Jack’s grasp, Declan accesses this world using insane people as conduits, usually the homeless ranting and raving.
Part of the surprise is the fact that there is a surprise at all. So many horror plots are simple padding between each hapless victim’s gruesome demise. Without a familiar setting and cast of disposable young adults, Colder already had a leg-up before its intriguing premise. Though long bouts of expository dialogue slow the story down in spots, for most of the duration, Colder is a unique and unpredictable story well-told.
Its use of the mentally ill as a plot device is either troubling or illuminating, or maybe both. In Colder, the saddest and most tortured people Declan runs into on the street are actually linked to the insanity of the parallel Hungry World. He’s conflicted about using them for his own ends, and even attempts to make amends at one point. But the story itself is still writing in a fantasy explanation for the real agony of actual people we see every day on the street.
It could be considered insulting, but if we decide to be offended by Colder, we then have to consider the rest of comics in popular culture. For decades, Batman has been sending the criminally insane back to Arkham Asylum. Characters like The Joker, Two-Face and The Riddler are specific kinds of crazy, but the only lenience comics and movies afford them for their condition is that they are rarely killed or executed for their actions. Perhaps Colder feels different because its mentally ill are victims with faces and names that could be real, instead of fantasy villains armed with fatal laughing gas.
As nebulous as the story can be, its illustrations are undeniably impressive. Juan Ferreyra does a fantastic job of creating an entire dimension in the Hungry World and a creepy and frightening villain in Nimble Jack.
His idiosyncratic look is like a refined version of a cartoonists’ sketchbook. The “real” world is lush, filled in with soft textures that look like they were made from colored pencil (with watercolor highlights). That same technique is used to illustrate the grisly and inventive gore (not to mention Hungry World in its entirety), making it all the more remarkable.
Ferreyra’s greatest achievement might be Nimble Jack himself. Whether he’s crawling sideways through a doorway or faking empathy with a pouty lip, Jack always feels like a fully realized character, a fresh kind of pure evil.
You have a lot of options when it comes to Halloween media. There are a ton of safe and predictable routes to go down if you don’t want to be creeped out. Assuredly, at some point the SyFy Channel will let you watch Jason hack a bunch of kids to death, this time on a boat. Or you could ditch the security blanket and go for something a little bit different.
