Written by James Tynion IV

Art by Fernando Blanco

Colours by Jordie Bellaire

Letters by Aditya Bidikar

Edits by Steve Foxe

Design by Dylan Todd

Published by Image

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A teenage boy goes on a murder spree of horrific scope. His brother struggles to understand and, when the story hits the news, a tech billionaire begins making calls. They’ve seen this before. And they know what comes next.

Almost everything about W0rldtr33 issue 1 works. James Tynion IV is a fantastic writer and has an instinctive understanding of horror that starts from character and never blinks or looks away. Fernando Blanco’s art is great too, expressive and grounded all at once. A book like this has to live and die based on how much unease you feel and there is fist clenching unease on every page here. The opening murder spree is on camera, on the page and in front of you constantly. It’s meant to feel awful, meant to feel wrong and most of all, meant to be witnessed. That’s the point both in the plot and in the interaction between book and reader. Jordie Bellaire’s colours too work fantastically here and the static ‘glitch’ captured when people glimpse the undernet is chilling. The book flickers with horror, it feels tensed, crouched. We don’t know if it’s hiding or preparing to pounce. We soon learn it’s both. Aditya Bidikar’s letters close every circuit too, each character’s voice popping as hard as the violence does. It’s confident, clear eyed, brutal stuff.

Now we need to talk about the undernet and about PH34R. The undernet is a seemingly sentient network of rage and murder that lives beneath the internet. Gabriel, the tech billionaire, and his friends discovered it and stopped it years ago. The art team do a spectacular job of showing us a flashback to that moment, one I suspect we’ll be returning to, and the cost of facing down and defeating the undernet is written all across Gabriel’s prematurely white-haired face. This B-plot is great and Tynion IV does an excellent job of weaving it around the present and the fate of the Lane brothers. Gibson is the teenage murderer whose spree opens the book. Ellison is his older brother who, along with girlfriend Fausta, looks set to be the main characters. They’re fun, instantly likable people and you feel for them precisely because of how realistic they feel.

That’s perhaps why PH34R is built like she is. It’s definitely why she’s the book’s single biggest weakness. A disciple of the undernet, PH34R is a tattooed assassin who is very interested in Gibson. She also likes to be naked when killing people and that nudity is by some distance the least interesting part of the book. Not for prudish reasons but because it’s the one time the book is both dull and, honestly, presents as lazy. PH34R plays like a cheap attempt to shock in a book that doesn’t need it and looks exactly like you’d expect. Zero body fat, buxom, fresh off the sexy assassin central casting production line. Everyone you know is a different shape, even evil murdernet worshippers and yet, here we are with a character whose aesthetic says Die Antwoord and whose body shapes says 90s DC comic. Again. It’s the other side of the same thinking that makes Dune’s Baron Harkonnen’s weight an integral part of his moral toxicity and I am so, so far beyond bored of body shape as character shorthand I can’t articulate it. It’s especially egregious in a book like this that clearly makes every other choice with vast care.

Verdict: W0rldtr33 Issue 1 is brutal, clever and almost entirely worth your time if you have the stomach for it. It’s got, for me, one big fault. Your mileage will vary, even if comic body shapes still, somehow, do not. 7/10

Alasdair Stuart