by Brandy Dykhuizen. We’ve long known that Tinseltown can be a dark little place, and the muted colors and oppressive miasma hanging over Glitterbomb doesn’t try to convince us otherwise. What dream could be worth a constant regimen of rejection, especially when that rejection is bookended with a few hours locked inside the choked purgatory of the freeway, where you’re left to contemplate the agony of exclusion?
We can hardly blame Farrah for veering off-road to take what she hoped to be one final dip in the Pacific. But murky underwater forces spit her back out onto the strand, turning her pain, anger and vulnerability into something a little more useful — though whether it’s more useful for Farrah or for the monsters of the deep, we’ve yet to understand.
Jim Zub’s story is wholly delightful – a murderous revenge romp, carried out on the sorts of self-satisfied pricks no one will really miss anyways. Newcomer Djibril Morisette-Phan makes a remarkable entrance, showing a particular talent for faces, really getting behind the masks that we wear. Morisette-Phan’s dark, watery strokes that intertwine the monster’s furtive tentacles with tenebrous, weedy shapes make one think twice about diving into the deep.
In a town where everybody uses each other to get ahead (even the babysitters have demands), there is a force set on leveling the playing field. The beauty of Zub’s story is that we’re all just meat. The casting call is nothing more than a meat market. Now Farrah gets to make a meal out of all the backstabbing agents and sanctimonious cows just “trying to be nice.” Glitterbomb #1 rains horror and revenge onto the everything-is-beautiful Hollywood delusion to fantastic results. Highly recommended.
Image Comics / $3.99
Written by Jim Zub.
Art by Djibril Morisette-Phan.
Colors by K. Michael Russel.
Letters by Marshal Dillon.
9 out of 10
