SPOILERS: Review: Voice in the Dark #1 @TopCow

Voice in the Dark #1

By 

Larime Taylor

www.facebook.com/larime.taylor

@TopCow

                           As a big fan of Top Cow and their crew, I've been seeing this comic advertised for weeks now. I'm not sure what I was expecting out of this comic, but I ended up pleasantly surprised. If I had to liken it to other piece of work, I think I would say it's a little Dexter and a little A Scanner Darkly. Now I say A Scanner Darkly to use as an example in tone. I could easily see this in the same format, kind of a moving graphic novel movie, but that's still not where it compares for me. How can I put this... most times when I read comics, there's a background noise. Kind of like a soundtrack. A constant buzz of sound. What Taylor did here was give us a story where the only background noise was the main character's narration. 

                             Where it compares to Dexter is that the main character seems to be struggling with the urge to kill. Not a stereotypical, clinical, psychopath, Zoey is your average, middle class mixed-race young woman. On the outside, nothing seem out of the ordinary. But Zoey tells us a different story. Zoey's actually taken a life. And gotten away with it. Her bestfriend is outed as gay, disowned by her parents and attempts to take her life. Zoey kills the girl responsible for outing Seven, Zoey's best friend and newly adopted sibling, after she's disowned by her parents and thrown out of the house.

                        Zoey's starting college, living in a dorm with three other young women, and also hosts a call-in radio talk show, Voice in the Dark; callers are anonymous and are encouraged to share their deepest darkest secret - it also seems to be the catharsis Zoey needs to keep her "other personality" at bay. She talks to this Other Zoey, or Dark Zoey in the mirror, and makes her a deal - if Dark Zoey helps her, keeps her calm and confident and from killing people, then Zoey will let Dark Zoey have free reign during the show. 

                         The book leaves us with a nice little cliffhanger that makes you want to show up for issue 2. One of the things I liked most about Larime's writing is that he's really really good at bringing voice to even minor supporting characters. I hear them in my head. These couple be real people that you meet in the real world. They immediately come to life, not just with their dialogue, but their movements and little gestures. 

I definitely recommend picking this up, if for no other reason than to support creator owned comics, their creators, and of course, the awesomeness that is Top Cow. 

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KEEP GEEKIN'!