Vanessa has taken a trip into the woods to find herself. But what she finds instead is…well, pretty much what you’d expect from a horror story, as it turns out. Does Beyond the Breach #1 offer anything beyond the usual? It’s written by Ed Brisson, with art by Damian Couceiro, colors by Patricia Delpeche, and letters by Hassan Otsmane-Elhao.
There may be no genre where pacing is more critical than horror. It’s the slow, ratcheting tension as you realize something is wrong. An audience goes into a horror story knowing it’s a horror story. The existence of a gruesome murder isn’t going to shock them. We know things are going to go downhill. It’s just a matter of how. Good horror knows this and uses that anticipation to its advantage before shoving a knife into your gut and twisting the blade.
There are tricks a creator can use in prose or film to pace that tension. In those media, they have tighter control of how the audience explores a work in time. There can be quick cuts where you just quite don’t see the monster or obscufated text that allows readers to fill in their own dread on what the creature might be. It’s much harder in comics where every panel can last for an eternity, and every page is fully exposed when you turn to it. You can speed up or slow down time with tricks like panel density, but that comes at the expense of the set length of the issue, especially in monthly books. We’re in an era of excellent horror comics with projects like Razorblades and I Breathed A Body being incredible examples of writers and artists using the medium to its fullest. Which makes misses like Beyond The Breach #1 so disappointing.
Ed Brisson has been a solid, if not spectacular, writer in the last few years of comics. His character work has been incredibly strong, even when his plotting has been lackluster, as seen on his recent New Mutants stint. Artist Damian Couceiro has been his frequent collaborator, providing dependable sequential storytelling. In Beyond The Breach, they deliver a comic that is weaker than the sum of its parts. A young woman, wholly unprepared for an adventure, is flung into a world of death and gore while having to guide a child to safety. It’s a basic set up and one we’ve seen time and time again, with The Last Of Us and Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead coming to mind, but the team fails to do anything interesting or novel with the premise.
It falls flat from the opening, an establishing shot of a normal Californian forest followed by a page of expletives and exposition, before throwing us immediately into this strange world beyond the breach. There is no time to care about Vanessa, our lead. We know she is angry at her ex-boyfriend and her family and is taking a trip to find herself. We’ve seen this plot before; hell, it’s such a well-worn trope that the tongue-in-cheek The Cabin In The Woods used it as the background for its protagonist. Just as soon as we meet Vanessa, we are ejected from her car and into a world of blood-hungry creatures.
The book wants us to be afraid, but it doesn’t want to put the work into setting up any tension. More than that, there’s no reason to be particularly unsettled by any of this. There are creatures devouring unlucky souls, but there is no weight to the action. Gore can be overused as a grindhouse trick, but in comics, where a reader can linger on the grotesque, it’s an amazing tool to unsettle. It tells you something is wrong, your eyes are drawn to the parts that should be on the inside, things which we should not see but do. Couceiro draws pools of blood, shards of glass and gnashing teeth, but the end result is pedestrian. It’s not gruesome enough to instil emotion on its own, and the breakneck pace means we don’t have a stake in what’s happening. Colorist Patricio Delpeche’s palette of plant and fire and shadow does what it can to strengthen things, but it’s a lost cause.
There’s a bathtub curve when it comes to horror. On one end there is the good horror that scares, unsettles and upsets, like 2013’s The Evil Dead. On the other is schlocky, B-Movie horror that grosses you out but appeals to a giddy internal need to be delighted by the absurd, like the original 1981 The Evil Dead. Beyond The Breach #1 falls in the middle of those extremes. It tries to pull out a big gun, the apparent death of a child, at the end, but the lack of investment or tension turns it into a misfire. It’s a bland bit of horror that can’t manage to get a single reaction from the audience and may end up a textbook example of what not to do.
Zachary Jenkins co-hosts the podcast Battle of the Atom and is the former editor-in-chief of ComicsXF. Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside all this.
