Small Town Terror — A ‘Revival’ Retrospective

Welcome to the table,

I’ve always been a fan of stories that feel quiet. There is for sure a place in my heart for big universe spanning tales or and stories featuring bombastic battles between monster kings and mutants with knives in their knuckles but where I really sink into sequential storytelling is the stories that focus on small towns, quiet horror, and slow burn offerings that drip out precious plot devices like blood from a shallow wound.

Revival was one of those books that really hit the mark for me in that quiet rural horror space. Created by Tim Seeley and Mike Norton the 47-issue run was published by Image Comics starting in 2012 and running until 2017.

The story focuses around the town of Wausa, Wisconsin, where the dead begin to come back to life with results that get more and more unhinged and terrifying as the series goes. The protagonists of the story are sisters named Dana and Martha “Em” Cypress. Dana is a detective and mother to Cooper, a kid who honestly feels authentic as a normal kid from a divided home, and Em is an un-killable mess of a human who develops into a fairly complex and delightful character as the story progresses.

Did the un-killable bit catch you off guard? Well when I was reading issue one for the first time it totally threw me for a loop as well. You see, due to some really unhinged experimentations with occult nonsense among other things everyone who died on January 1st returned to life on January 2nd. These un-killable folk were known as “revivers” and they would start getting more and more twisted and unhinged as the story progressed along its run.

As you could guess from my comments above, Em was one of these “revivers” and her ability to return from the dead would be a closely guarded secret between the sisters as Dana tries to serve the community by dealing with crimes centered around the other “revivers” while secretly investigating Em’s death as Em has no memory of how she came to die in the first place.

As the “revivers” die and live again they start to grow more and more chaotic taking bigger and bigger risk socially and physically as they can seemingly heal from almost any amount of damage.

While all of this is going on townsfolk are starting to see these really unnerving creatures with ghostly humanoid appearances who begin to prowl the woods surrounding the town. These creatures are some of my favorite monster designs in comics. It’s such a simple and strange distortion of the human form and features but the way it balances out Norton’s art style in the series really sells the supernatural aspect of these odd creatures.

While reading the series it is difficult not to catch the religious iconography and themes though Seeley and Norton really do a good job of weaving them into the story in a way that makes them feel natural and not heavy handed, a really impressive feat when you look at the way most resurrection small town horror is crafted.

The reason of course for this mini-retrospective is that a show based on this quiet farm noir comic has recently premiered and while the news cycles and general state of the world has been very loud those of us watching and wondering about pop culture trends and reviews have seen a fairly positive response to the first episode of the show so far, so that makes me hopeful that this story will get the kind of treatment it justly deserves.

Until next time, Revival is one of those series that now that I have started dipping back into after some time away I will end up reading from beginning to end. It’s god a few moments where I think it gets a little to loud, but for the most part the setting, story, and characters really feels like it sells that quiet long form horror offering that I really do adore.