Advance Review — ‘Of The Earth’ #1 Is A Slow Burn Of Terror
by Tom Smithyman
Overview
Don’t expect this first issue of a six-part limited series to scare you too much. Instead, pay attention as your stomach tightens every time your flip the page as you await more building dread. It’s a slow burn — and a really good one at that.
Overall
9/10The best horror stories are not the ones that scare you from the outset. Instead, they are the ones that slowly build — giving an unease that slowly builds to dread.
In its first issue, Of the Earth is all that and more.
Tabby Black is on her way to Gramma’s house in — get this — Solitude, Texas. Along the way, the young woman breaks up Sammy, her apparent significant other who doesn’t take things well. Sammy “knows people” and threatens to take back something that Tabby has taken. Tabby also gets stopped by a spooky and heavily sweating cop. And she comes across a roadkill — a scrawny coyote — or something along those lines.
None of these is, by itself, terrifying. But taken together, one after the other, the dread is clearly building to something horrific.
Writers Chris Condon and Andrew Ehrich know their way around horror stories. Condon is known for That Texas Blood and News from the Fallout, while Ehrich is new to comics, but was involved in the web series Trailers from Hell. Together, the pair know when to add some needed exposition and when to let creepy visuals tell a more dreadful story.
And when The Walking Dead artist Charlie Adlard is the one illustrating, that dread is only heightened. No, there’s no zombies chomping on survivors here. But what Adlard presents is far worse, because we can recognize it is our world. And everyone in that world, save Tabby, seems off.
Adding to the foreboding is Pip Martin’s colors. Martin sticks largely with a yellow screen through most of the issue, giving everyone and everything a jaundiced look. It’s only when she breaks from that palette that you know you need to pay even more attention.
Of the Earth #1 isn’t going to scare you to death. That’s simply not the point. Instead, the creative team wants to fill you with dread every time you turn the page. Can they keep it up for five more issues? Swallow your fear, and let’s find out together.
Of the Earth #1 — written by Chris Condon and Andrew Ehrich, illustrated by Charlie Adlard, colored by Pip Martin, and lettered by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou — will be available tomorrow in comic book stores and on digital platforms from Image Comics.
