THIS REVIEW IS SPOILER-FREE.
by Jarrod Jones. Ed PIskor’s murder-on-the-dark-web series Red Room is a deliberate piece of comics provocation; if you’re offended by it, bummed by it, or just plain grossed out by it, that’s its goal. Or, rather, that’s one of its goals. If you read any issue of Red Room — and you can read any one of them at all, as they’re formatted to be one-and-done stories — you’ll find character is more a preoccupation of Piskor’s than the splatter.
There is splatter, oh mercy, is there splatter, and it decorates quite a few pages of Red Room. Piskor’s Crumb-infused, detail-oriented work means that whenever someone gets got in his comics, their end is fittingly gnarly and repellant. He’s an inventive artist, too; one wonders if Ed has landed on some watchlist for the kind of stuff he’s been googling for inspiration. For folks who admire the work of Tom Savini or Screaming Mad George, Red Room has such sights to show you.
Not for the squeamish, say. Yet Piskor takes measures to soften the impact of all this arterial spray and rent limbs and opened abdomens by sapping color from the proceedings. The way people die in this series is still insane, but the only red you’ll see in Red Room is usually found on those luridly inviting EC-style covers. There’s also a tinge of yellow on the pages Piskor has his comics printed on, a hue that seems calibrated to evoke that sinking feeling one might get if one stumbled across a stack of older, seamier comics stashed in the back of the local hobby shop.
His latest Red Room joint, dopily titled Crypto Killaz, downshifts from the sustained havoc we’ve seen in previous issues, focusing even more on the characters affected by the series’ carnage than the carnage itself. For the uninitiated, a quick summation: people of means congregate on the Dark Web to watch murderers conduct their business in encrypted live-streaming events called “Red Rooms.” They tip the killers and their host cryptocurrency if the deeds done are pleasing enough. Pay-per-pound of flesh.
Red Room is concerned with the economic and social impact these digital snuff videos have on its world and the world beyond it. People get busted for downloading Red Room clips all the time, and others are lured into its grisly underbelly because there’s profit to be made if you’re sick enough to kill for it. Then there are the innocent people who get yanked into its red-streaked orbit through no fault of their own. As the series states in the banner that starts off every issue: “Who are its victims? Who are the customers? Who are the murderers?”
Crypto Killaz #1 returns readers to the lives of the Fairfield family, Davis and his daughter Brianna, who have been inexorably tied to the mysterious Mistress Pentagram’s red rooms since 2021’s Red Room #1. Davis is known as “The Decimator,” Pentagram’s biggest star, whose penchant for butchery has put Pentagram within reach of being the “number one red room on the dark web.” Money is being made for him and his “Bree-Bree,” and things are going well — until Davis’ extracurricular activities, so heinous that the press eventually dubs him “The Steel City Cannibal,” land him in prison. That means Brianna is without her father, and Pentagram is without her star.
What follows is decidedly tame for Red Room, but there’s still horror to be gleaned from the issue. As Brianna navigates life without her father, working through the knowledge that he was a serial killer (there’s still some denial there), she’s stalked by Pentagram’s sleazeball accomplice attorney Dominic DeSimone, who believes Bree is sitting on Davis’ sizable crypto earnings as The Decimator. What could happen to Bree and what that might mean for this next phase of Pentagram’s dark work is the issue’s hook. It sinks right in.
Suspense and drama and gross stuff, the kind you’ll find in EC’s The Haunt of Fear or Tales from the Crypt. The ethos of EC’s lived-in terror tales lives in Piskor’s comics, which makes them a cozy read even with all their performative mayhem. His next issue promises to introduce a character called “The Crypto Keeper,” which *hyuk*.
Piskor calls Red Room “outlaw comics,” a term that comics distributor and patron saint of the darker comic arts Glen Hammonds originally coined. He’s weaponized that phrase as a selling point. It’s also a statement of intent; Ed’s exorcising demons with this strip, demons put in his noggin by the likes of Tim VIgil, James O’Barr, Guy Davis, and countless other ink-stained heroes. Each line Piskor lays on the page is a response to every wild thing he’s seen etched in a comic book, wondering if he could ever pull it off. Red Room might be too high profile to ever be stashed among its brethren, but as a tribute to the outlaw comics that made Ed Piskor the cartoonist he is today, it’s ferocious work.
9 out of 10
Red Room: Crypto Killaz! #1 is available in (most) stores now. For more information, click this.
Fantagraphics Press / $3.99
Story and art by Ed Piskor.
More DoomRocket Reviews:
Mojiken’s A Space For The Unbound is a dramatic trudge through the 90s
The return of Beauchamp’s Blab! anthology is a cause for celebration
Hypnotic is Robert Rodriguez’s Inception, only not as fun as that sounds
