Review: ‘Under The Influence’ #2 Is Another Viral Hit

Welcome to the table,

I work in social media. I do a lot of things, but for the last decade or so I’ve been behind the scenes working in strategy and managerial positions in the social media space. The front-facing part of the job where you are on the screen influencing and promoting is not the role I play. I manage those pieces, run metrics to make sure the return on investment is hitting benchmarks required to show value for investment, track audience behaviors and connect people to make brand synergies work.

I tell you all of that so I can express this thought.

Under the Influence from Mad Cave Studios scares the hell out of me.

This fear is purely based on the fact that I can see it happening. All of it. Each piece feels rooted in a familiar foundation that fills me with the kind of dread that those who work on living platforms live with. There is a constant feeling that each platform, each notification, and each email is going to be a chaotic explosion of fallout you have to figure out how to manage without losing points across metrics that are complex and ever-changing.

I watch horror movies to relax. Monsters don’t worry me, ghosts are friendly in my opinion. Watching irritating and often toxic people find themselves learning hard lessons they needed to learn from ancient forces beyond time and space soothes my soul. The horror that Eliot Rahal has created in this book though haunts me. It’s worrying and existential and I think about it way too much and then need to go watch something light-hearted like Silence of the Lambs or The Conjuring to mellow out.

Written by the aforementioned Rahal, with art by Stefano Simeone and letters by Frank Cvetkovic, Under The Influence #2 starts with a flashback of our socially skilled secret agent protagonist Cara in an idyllic-looking, yet oddly sinister, place beyond the reaches of tech and modernity. The warm and inviting, yet super malevolent Sunday service setting is rendered so brilliantly. There is a panel that makes use of colored lines to represent light through a stained glass window that is so mood-setting that it transported me back to my youth in a time before I realized how many wolves were in sheep’s clothing.

I mean it when I say this book scares the hell out of me. It hits so close to home on so many levels.

The flashback is overlaid with a conversation between Cara and the influencer who seems to want to escape the cult-like following he has amassed but can’t get away for some yet-to-be-undisclosed reason.

Then… gunfire rings out.

The issue is action-packed in a non-traditional way. There are no bombastic fights between super men or brutal bare-knuckled brawls between grizzled heroes. Where the tension and action of Under the Influence shines is in its carefully curated dialog. The whole book is full of layered conversations that feel as manufactured and polished as the biggest influencer’s aspirational posts about coffee or pampas grass.

If you dig psychological horror, you will like this book. If you enjoy flawless art, you will like this book. If you work in social media or understand enough to know it’s way bigger than having a phone and access to an app, you will find a lot of this book worrying as hell but also… you will like this book.

Until next time, I hate this book… and I love it. It really gets so much right and that fact alone scares the hell out of me.