Sink: Cutthroat

Story by John Lees
Art by Alex Cormack
Lettering by Shawn Lee

Published by ComixTribe. Not sold yet on their site, but you can pre-order it HERE.

Solid story.

John Lees and Alex Cormac deliver on a solid, gritty tale that satisfies. I'm always in amazement at the economy of Lees' style of writing, at knowing exactly what to leave in. There's never even one panel that can be deleted from his comic book tales.

Sink: Cutthroat is once again centered in the Sink Hill area of Glasgow where true evil has never gone away. We first saw that with the killer clowns -avenged by Mr. Dig. Then a story concerning Mr. Dig alone. 

Spats with the neighbor.

Sink: Cutthroat starts with a simple, ordinary old woman and her tiny pug dog living in a row house. She quarrels with her neighbor, a single mother who has a needy three year old boy who cries at night. The old woman, Chrissie knows something about Sink Hill, its evil history. She suspects the worst when the boy goes missing.

Iron Tooth Jack.

Chrissie is worried that her dream-nemesis has returned: Iron Tooth Jack. Iron Tooth is a monster who preyed on children way back. He's depicted with a horrific extended mouth displaying many rows of sharp dark spiky teeth. He haunts her nightmares as she dozes off to her geriatric sleep while the TV displays static.

Drawn in.

There's a methodology at work here, and with a number of John Lees' previous stories. He tends to start with ordinary or even strikingly ordinary people, as in the case here with a dottery old woman Chrissie. She ambles around mumbling to the dog. Chrissie calls her daughter on the two-way visual meeting app on her tablet, reminiscing about the good old days. She stops by an old friend -another decrepit old woman- in the hospital. Coupled with Alex Cormac's unmistakable style, we're drawn into an environment that's shabby, lower middle class, people struggling day to day to make ends meet. Without saying it, you just know that Chrissie is on a government stipend. Her single mother neighbor is doing her best but also has some trying times. When you set up a horror story in an environment that's already conflicted, there's a lot of directions (and misdirections) the story can take to exploit that feeling of malaise.

There's a thick second half of the comic: the support material and some background information which I'm not really going to review here. Suffice to say, Mr. Lees and Mr. Cormack have promised there will be more stories to come!

Next Two Tuesdays:

A six part saga from Trevor Fernandes-Lenkiewicz:

Area 51: The Helix Project!