Neil Kleid

Issue #1 of The Panic was recently published. It's a 5 part comic that is one of Comixology's Originals. Release #2 comes out next week and in early November a paperback version containing all 5 issues will be published.

The Panic opens with Annie Delgado on a train for her commute into New York City. The train suddenly derails and Annie's best friend dies. The train car that she is trapped on is beneath the Hudson River and neither she nor her ten other fellow commuters can get their cell phones to work. The group decides to help each other in order to survive the night. They begin to make plans on how to climb out of the train to safety but they each have cultural, racial and political biases that get in the way of communicating. They soon realize that one of their fellow commuters was not on the train before the crash and all are suspicious of him.

The comic is advertised as a horror story but I felt is was more a suspense thriller. I did not see any horror aspects in issue 1. Perhaps it is coming. The artwork was interesting. Most of the pages are colored in blue and the varying funky hairstyles of the characters helps the reader figure out who is who. The publisher stated in their summary that the theme of the comic is loss of security and control of your surroundings. I did not analyze the story as such but enjoyed it immensely.… (mais)

A decent effort. The whodunnit aspect was reasonably predictable, but there were some minor twists in the motivations I didn't see coming, and there were enough red herring suspects that I got well over a third through the book before I felt confident about who it was. The character voices are by and large on point from the comics (albeit a bit less witty than they usually are). The book's main weakness is an overabundance of descriptive narration and very repetitive inner monologues, but for a tie-in novel to a long running comic book series, this was still better than expected.… (mais)