STORY BY Paul Tobin

ART BY Juan Ferreyra

Colder is set in a world where a Jungian Shadowland lies just beyond the perception of sanity. This place of nightmares are where all the fears and traumas dwell and wait for their chance to feed on damaged souls. There are two who can travel back and forth between chaos and order. Nimble Jack, the antagonist who looks like a gothy Neo-Nazi, feeds on those who are the most insane and corrupted. Nimble Jack has an uncanny ability to find his victims one loose thread that keeps their sanity stitched together and pull until they begin leaping from tall buildings or slipping nooses around their necks. Colder references the cold skinned Declan. Declan can feed on insanity too but in the process he is able to mend the fractured egos and pull them back into orderly state of being. These two form the duality between chaos and order, apathy and sympathy, despair and hope, and demonstrate what happens when one is tipped too far.

In first few pages, Paul Tobin walks us through an asylum where oppressive order burns away to violent chaos. With each new patient, their maddening diatribes become less coherent and their actions become more violent. This culminates with the introduction between Nimble Jack and Declan. In one scene, Ferreyra and Tobin perfectly capture Nimble Jack’s ruthless apathy. He crawls into a convict’s cell and unravels the man and motivates him to hang himself. Nimble Jack watches the convicts kicking dance of death and delightfully compares it to a man swimming. Meanwhile, they use Reece, Declan’s caretaker, as a way to demonstrate Declans compassion and sympathy. In order to get Reece to understand Nimble Jack and Declan’s world, Declan allows Reece to start losing her grip on reality in order to see the Shadowland. The deterioration of Reece’s state of mind throws Declan into deep regret and remorse.

Every character is a macabre caricature done in beautiful inks and paints. The panels are creative and break the mold in order to match the surrealism of this cerebral story. There’s the nostalgic flash back scenes which have newspaper or comic strip style gutters and framing. Whereas the shadowland will use its colors to softly create boarders while retaining the surreal aspect that each frame is fading into the other. Or, there are action sequences framed by rearview mirrors or close up shots of Nimble Jack in Declan’s eyeballs. Watching Nimble Jack grotesquely crawl out from underneath a victims skin, it’s hard to deny this is the most beautifully depicted nightmare currently on the shelves.

Colder has a cerebral depth which is often left out of most horror genre comics these days. Instead of relying on a cat and mouse chase, the creators decided to plunge into the depths of nightmares. They’ve created an unnerving intensity which will make its readers jump at their own shadows.