It’s obvious this first entry was to be as full an introduction to the story as possible. You’ll know when something bad is coming. Glowing eyes, blood, and vampire skin are all given an additional shine that makes things stand out in the inky blacks that dominate each page. Luis NCT’s colors balance the art well, excelling in highlighting the more supernatural elements in each scene. It’s dense and requires a slower read to fully appreciate. This is an impressive feat considering his style finds strong echoes in the works of Jon Jay Muth and Dave McKean. It’s very structured and calculated with an eye for detail on things the comic will circle back to.Īlexander and letterer Marshall Dillon give the text a chance to breath, but they too know when the art needs to carry the weight of the storytelling and vice versa. Barnes has a lot to say but never at the expense of pacing. These short but deep cuts into the backstory of Philly situate the comic’s characters in a place that was allowed to become bad, with every drug-riddled corner and every forgotten housing project bearing the marks of their origin stories (be it to explain how poverty or crime came to be in those areas).Īlexander’s art is truly a sight to behold as it makes space for worldbuilding and character development in spite of a text-heavy script. There are scenes in which the book’s characters offer brief historical insights, via captions or voice-over text, to explain why certain parts of the city look so forgotten and decayed.

The comic makes it a point to remind readers that a city’s bad elements are always the product of key choices, either made by the government or other groups. Beyond the vampires is a look at how far the City of Brotherly Love goes to keep its ugliness away from the tourist-friendly spaces advertised as the original stomping grounds of the nation’s Founding Fathers. Horror ensues.īarnes and Alexander aren’t complacent with just telling a simple tale of blood-sucking in a big American city with a history of violence-the title itself is a term often used to reference Philly’s high murder-rate. The son then decides to pick up the trail that led to his father’s death.

The father, a career detective, was investigating a missing persons case that led him straight into the mouths of hungry vampires. Published by Image Comics, Killadelphia follows a cop that comes to Philadelphia all the way from Baltimore to bury his murdered father.

Killadelphia, Vol. 1 by Rodney Barnes