Something Spooky: ‘Redfork’ Is A Horror Fable That Feels Much Too Real
by Tony Thornley
It’s that time of year! As the days get longer, and the shadows creep up our driveways, it’s time for the Comicon.com staff to visit our favorite scary stories for the Halloween season. So starting today, we have 13 horror, Halloween, or just plain pumpkin-spiced stories for the season.
The best horror heightens the world outside our window, showing us that sometimes the everyday and mundane is as scary or worse than the monstrous supernatural. In TKO Studios’ Redfork it’s hard to see a difference…
Though they’ve become largely defunct, TKO Studios released some of the most riveting comics in the last decade, and Redfork continues to be the one that sticks with me the most. It’s an exploration of greed, poverty, hopelessness, and what a person would do to overcome it. It was created by Alex Paknadel, Nil Vendrell Pallach, Guilia Brusco, and Ryan Ferrier.
Six years ago, Noah McGlade took the fall for a crime he didn’t commit, just so his brother had a chance at a better life. Now after his time served, he returned home to Redfork, West Virginia. At first he has to battle drugs, illness and poverty, however after a coal mine cave-in a powerful supernatural force might change everything…
Horror requires a slow build sometimes, and the more relatable it is, the harder the horror hits. Showing a small town torn apart by a supernatural force that exploits the economic instability and inequity present in America today hits hard. That makes what Paknadel, Vendrell, and Brusco do in these six issues is perfect.
It’s hard for any writer to step into a story with such a clear sense of character, setting and conflict defined so well so quickly. However Paknadel does just that easily. Within a few pages we understand that Redfork is the sort of place where you have to steal from the more affluent people in town because you need to pay the bills, and maybe do a little heroin afterwards.
Paknadel does a great job of world building here. Redfork feels like a real place, but it’s not a good place. It’s broken and dying. The mining company that’s keeping it running is only doing it for deep, dark reasons that become clear later in the book. It might be a little, stereotypical dying Appalachian town, but I liked the setting. Taking two issues or so to really establish that was a strong start to the story, so when the supernatural shit started, you cared.
All of that is even before the supernatural threat rears its head. Some of the worst monsters are hidden by a smile and the creeping eldritch horror here is no exception to that. Paknadel gives us a villain in Gallowglass who recognizes that he could unleash his horror on a city tearing itself apart at seams. He captures the feel of a dying small American town, and adds an insidious force to capitalize on that, cruelly giving our characters hope while using its evil to take everything from them.
And Gallowglass himself … The story’s boogeyman feels like something out of Stephen King. He’s disarmingly charming and ruggedly handsome. He got a devil’s bargain for everyone. And as the story progresses you realize that he doesn’t just have more going on that you can see — he’s evil on a level that’s just terrifying.
Where Paknadel’s story captures the spirit of a horror that preys on hope, Vendrell shows us why the characters needed that hope so badly. Along with Brusco’s mood-setting color work, he shows us every track mark, several boarded over windows, and sunken shoulders that when Gallowglass arrives with his hope, we know exactly why people jump at it. Then when things take a turn for the grotesque, we still see humanity in the horror, even as Gallowglass’s evil twists and breaks the characters.
This is a story that I cannot recommend enough. It’s horrifying and heartbreaking in equal measure, and it’s the perfect horror story for our upside-down and hopeless world, and has only gotten more relevant as time goes on.
