I received Blink by Christopher Sebela in exchange for my honest review. Its been a while since I read a horror comic and this one had an eye-catching, interesting art style. Then I saw that it was found-footage horror and I needed to give this a shot.
Content Warnings:
Blink is a horror comic and contains horrific themes including childhood trauma, cult-like scenarios, monsters, murder, war, stabbing, blood, extreme body modification and mutilation (both voluntary and forced), kidnapping and imprisonment, suicide, obsession, depression, agoraphobia, and more. Take care of yourself and remember, its just a story.
Eisner-nominated Christopher Sebela (Dirtbag Rapture), Hayden Sherman (Dark Spaces: Wildfire), and Nick Filardi (Rogue Planet) team up for a found-footage horror where uncovering your past will leave you trapped inside it.
Wren Booker was three when she was found alone and covered in blood on the streets of New York. Since that day, she’s been haunted by the childhood she can’t remember…until decades later when she finds a cryptic website streaming multiple CCT feeds from strange rooms in a ruined building. Something clicks, setting off hidden memories that lead her back to a place she’s seen in lifelong nightmares. Hunting for answers, Wren breaks in and finds herself lost in the camera-filled dark mazes of a decayed social experiment known only as BLINK…which she quickly discovers is not abandoned at all. But what should be a foreign nightmare-scape feels all too familiar for Wren as she follows her obsession all the way down, piecing together the story of BLINK—as well as her own ties to it.
5 Star Read
Found footage is not my favorite horror genre but there are some real gems in this sub-genre. I’m always intrigued when I see a book or comic book written as found footage because its so often linked to movies or tv that translating that feeling of shaky camera and glitchy feed to paper is a task worth looking at. Blink certainly was able to do that and more!
Honestly, the first pages made me think of the first found footage movie I ever saw, Fear dot com. This movie was not great but it scared me as a teen and seeing the early pages of Wren staring at her monitor at the CCT feeds unlocked that memory so hard for me. It was great.
I couldn’t put it down. Once I started reading Blink, I was glued. Like the main character, Wren, I couldn’t leave until I had answers. (Note: I read Blink on my phone when my house lost power during a wind storm. This likely effected my mood and attention. While power outages are stressful, this was a great mood for reading horror.) The pace was steady and didn’t let up. Each page dragged Wren and the reader further into the labyrinth of camera feeds and shadows.
The story is both unique and uses horror tropes that any fan will recognize. I was a particular fan of the way the story isolated Wren. It felt both frustrating and believable. Other tropes like obsession, childhood trauma coming back up, the monster in the closet (in this case, paralysis demon), and a twist that really jars the main character are all there to enjoy.
As far as artistry, I loved it. Not just the illustration style but the way the page twists and turns with the characters – it really helped to give the sense that the reader is tagging along with Wren as she makes her way through this labyrinth that is obviously tunneling and ripping its way into our world but doesn’t follow our world’s rules of physics and geography. It added to the tension as I turned my phone here and there to follow the words and characters. I felt afraid I would miss something, a phrase or clue and somehow missing that would mean that Wren also would miss it and that neither of us would figure out what was going on. It was great.
Recommendation
I highly recommend Blink for sci-fi horror fans who are into found footage and want to see how that translates to paper and/or are into psychological horror. Also fans of the darker side of American Gods by Gaiman or modern eldritch horror wherein gods aren’t exactly benevolent.
