Seth Holms can’t seem to write himself a happy ending. A True Crime bestselling author, he has been trying his best to move on to lighter fare, only to find that no matter how hard he tries, something always keeps pulling him back to dark, gruesome endings for the characters whose fate he controls. He’d better figure out how soon, though, because those gruesome endings? They’re happening out in the real world, exactly how he’s written them. A mystery awaits in You’ll Do Bad Things #1, written by Tyler Boss, drawn by Adriano Turtulici and lettered by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou.
There is beauty in the mundane. In city streets, in what the wind blows through outside your window. The conversations of people having a crummy day, or in a late night conversation between two friends. Terry Pratchett put forth the idea of looking past that beauty to just get on with our days. We invented boredom, because without it we’d never get any work done.
You’ll Do Bad Things #1 is anything but boring. It covers several mundane scenes — a date gone poorly, a conversation about grief, a struggling creative late with pages watching his bills pile up — and from a distance, the concept is not all that novel. There are scores of stories where a writer protagonist’s tales start becoming real (a consequence of letting those danged writers do so much storytelling), many of them even in the horror genre. It’s not the story you should be reading this comic for — it’s the telling.
There is a structured simplicity to Adriano Turtulici’s art, one that can make you feel like you’re reading a much older comic. One of the old romance comics, where characters weren’t designed to be recognizable, where who they were mattered less than the feelings their stories could evoke. There’s almost a crudeness to it — a warped curve here, eyes that seem off center there, colors bleeding out from their lines like there’s been a printing error. That simplicity, however, gives way to detail in the setting. Care is given to the backgrounds — buildings, walls, stuff laying about apartment shelves, the make of a car and the van driving past in the street ahead. The setting feels grounded, and real. You’re made to feel like you’re there, a silent witness, guided through the story one panel at a time.
The colors contribute to this feeling in a big way. Every scene is saturated with them, and there’s a simplicity there, too — an entire person will be saturated with one color, as the backdrops are with two or three others. They heighten the mood of every scene, giving you the feel of a late evening or a gloomy, quiet elevator ride. You feel the dimly lit green loneliness of a tacky bar, ready to close up, or the paler blues and yellows of a more ordinary scene highlighting the writer’s ordinary (if somewhat stressful) daily life. Some panels invite you to linger and let the mood seep into your soul. Others are lively, smaller, quickly guiding the eye from one moment to the next.
Tyler Boss’ writing is a perfect fit for the art. The saturation of mood in mundane settings, the cast of ordinary people just being people in an ordinary world — these are things his own art excels at. While the art enchants you, the writing of each character draws you deep into their inner worlds. It’s glimpses of people that feel as real as the setting does — there is love, and loss, grief, and there are petty upsets. There is an intimacy to these pages that’s given time, care and love — and when the horror, violence and bloodshed come, it’s all the more vivid for the intimacy that’s been created.
Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou completes this beautiful trifecta of mood-setting. He’s a letterer who likes to play, to experiment with different styles of expression as much as he possibly can, and where there are places where that can be distracting, here, he matches tone perfectly. His dialogue and thought bubbles bolster the liveliness in certain panels, his sound effects are as visceral as the bright red blood that fills the page. You can hear the sounds — you can feel them, as much as you can the mood that Turtulici’s colors create. The black caption boxes that denote writing evoke the dark coziness that good crime novels bring out — that sense of slow pacing, building quietly to shock and terror.
On its own, the mystery of writing that manifests in the real world is the least interesting part of the first issue, because few people are aware of the connection. Where this book excels is in making you care about what the book’s characters care about. Feeling what they feel, glimpsing the world through their eyes and lingering in their perspective for a moment. The best comics aren’t ones you read — they’re the ones you experience, and on that basis, this comic is up there with the best of them.
You’ll Do Bad Things #1 breathes new life into the ordinary — and then takes it away, quite cruelly, one vicious stab at a time. You won’t be able to look away.
You’ll Do Bad Things #1 is in stores March 26 from Image Comics. Buy it here. (Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, ComicsXF may earn from qualifying purchases.)
Armaan is obsessed with the way stories are told. From video games to theater, TTRPGs to comics, he has written for, and about, them all. He will not stop, actually; believe us, we've tried.
