Dude, This Is A Real Killer Party — Reviewing ‘Dead Teenagers’ #3

Hiding is a natural instinct, especially when being faced with gruesome time loop deaths. There’s also the hiding that we do from ourselves and from the world. Embracing our own truths can often be hard for a number of reasons.

While the time loop deaths are over, the dying isn’t as the remaining former teens turned adults fight for their lives in Dead Teenagers #3. Another powerful entry in this grand series comes from Jude Ellison S. Doyle, Caitlin Yarsky, and Becca Carey.

There’s a special sort of touch that allows a creative team to hit numerous emotional elements in one story. Horror, comedy, and real human struggles balance on one another so immaculately that they almost become one genre.

This is one of the things that draws me to read anything that Doyle writes. I know that no matter what the genre trapping might be, the feast that awaits is a well-crafted and fulfilling one. In just three issues, we’ve gotten so much meat on the ‘character development’ bone. These characters, short-lived as they are, feel fully realized and tangible in ways that some characters never achieve no matter how many stories they feature within.

There is the journey we get to see with Claire and their life now that they are out as Transgender in adulthood. That blends with showing the different ways the three remaining characters are dealing with the looming specter of death. Brandy feels like it’s all a game still and that it doesn’t matter while Claire is tired of hiding and JT is worried about everything that is happening.

Emotional ranges are off the charts with this issue and Yarsky brings all of them to vivid life. There is just so much emotive energy in her artwork that it bleeds off the page in copious amounts. Yes, I made a connection to blood when talking about a horror comic where a bunch of blood is released. You’re welcome.

Anyway, back to the artwork.

I just like how soft but also rough the textures are for Yarsky’s work. She really captures the complexity of life in how the feeling can shift at any moment. This is riddled with color palette choices which skew towards a more neutral tone in most respects, giving us a solid baseline in which to stand against the more vibrant flashes that come into play.

Let me speak about the paneling choices really fast. I love when artists play around with how panels should look and feel through an issue. Here, we have plenty where the panels float over other panels and often eschew the so-called standard shape to do something more fun and unique. It gives the whole issue a very different feeling in each of the different moments that we travel through.

Rounding it all out is the always fantastic lettering work that Carey provides. She finds ways to evoke emotional tones in the words, without having to alter them between characters or such, while saving bigger fonts, bubble shifts, and more for the appropriate moment. One example of this is found in a scene where people are screaming and dying because a killer crashes the party.

I love it when words burst bubbles to their limits because they are so loud. This gives me all that I need to hear these moments in my inner head voice perfectly, alongside all the subtle and not so subtle SFX that are deliciously rendered.

There are some threads coming together with this story and what happened to these characters. Not enough yet to really point a finger fully, and I’m fine with that. This team is creating a mystery that is this enriching while still delivering on every other level is the dream.

Dead Teenagers #3 is now available from Oni Press.