Story by Jim Zub
Art by Djibril Morissette-Phan
Colors by K Michael Russell
Published by Image Comics
I think it is weird that a comics company has developed the technology to reach into my brain and find what I like and put it all into a comic book, but that must be what happened at Image this week. Glitterbomb is my new favorite book. And it’s probably going to be yours.
Farrah is an actress past her prime, crawling her way through disappointing auditions and sleazy meetings with misogynist agents. At the end of her rope, she walks dramatically into the ocean, but instead of her own death, she meets something far more strange. Now infected with an Eldritch horror, she’s going to tear Hollywood down to a pile of smoking rubble.
Even without the scary parts, this was going to be an amazing book. The gritty realities of the film industry have usually made for great entertainment, from All About Eve and Singing In The Rain to The LA Complex and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. We can’t get enough about how hard it is to make it to the stories that shape us, feeding our schadenfraude and our ambition at the same time. “Oh, that would be awful, that would be miserable – but I could do it.” Jim Zub’s plotting and dialogue give this experience to rich and real characters, but there’s even more. The back of the issue has an essay from a production coordinator about the abuses she suffered on an independent film set. This would have made an amazing essay on Jezebel and is even better when matched to a supernatural horror book.
I can’t praise artist Djibril Morissette-Phan highly enough. His linework sells the horror like no one since Sean Murphy on the sublimely creepy Scott Snyder series, The Wake. It’s even more impactful when matched to the beautiful realism of Farrah’s everyday settings, like Joelle Jones’s suburban story, Lady Killer. And the page layout when Farrah meets her monster? Following panel to panel feels like drowning, and I mean that in the best way.
So come down to Ultimate Comics and get ready to fall in love with Glitterbomb. And don’t go in the water.
-MATT CONNER for Ultimate Comics