From the Reading Pile: Pixu - The Mark of Evil

Pixu: The Mark of Evil
By Gabriel Ba, Becky Cloonan, Vasilis Lolos, and Fabio Moon

Four of comics most, for lack of a better word, avant garde artists team up for one creepy story.

When a strange marking appears in their apartment building, five people begin to have their lives changed.

The story here is not the easiest to grasp. The "monster" is not a physical beast but a plague of the mind. The abstraction that crawls from the walls and windows into the characters is a feeling of dread, confusion, chaos, etc. These various dark thoughts creep into each of the tenants and eats away at them.

This is one of the more disturbing reads in quite a while. As the evil is mental, there is no beast to be slain, outside the apartment and its occupants themselves.

What is most astonishing is that the styles of the four artists blend together. They are, of course, complimentary, but there are moments when it is as if one artist did it all, even though you can definitively say it was this one or that in a particular panel. Collectively, they create a new visual vocabulary that is not present when they work individually.

Pixu is a ground breaking work of horror that will set its seed in the reader, much as it has its players.

RIYL: Locke & Key, Sin Titulo, Strange Embrace