A Voice in the Dark gets a literal injection of colour, but retains its dark sense of humour and clever storytelling in this follow-up series that proves talkback radio can be murder.
Writer: Larime Taylor
Artists: Larime Taylor, Jay Savage
Publisher: Top Cow/Image Comics
Rating: 9/10
Despite being one of the best reviewed new books of the last year, writer and artist Larime Taylor is the first to say that the book struggled to find an audience in its initial seven-issue arc. The darkly comic, black and white book about a young woman fighting against her urge to kill had all the things we regularly ask for in a comic, from a diverse set of mostly female characters to simply clever writing. So in an attempt to stand out from the crowd a little more, A Voice in the Dark has returned as a sequence of mini-series in the vein of Locke & Key, making the switch to colour but losing none of its charm in the process.
Despite the additional subtitle, Taylor picks up almost immediately from where A Voice in the Dark #7 left off. After a brief tease of things to come, in which Zoey and an initially unidentified man are being held at gunpoint, we flash back to the moments just after Zoey has committed another homicide. Meticulously planned, she seems to have gotten away with it, were it not for the fact there’s another killer wandering around her college town of Cutter’s Circle, one that knows almost everything about her.
With A Voice in the Dark: Get Your Gun, Taylor returns to the core strengths of his original concept. Using Zoey’s anonymous talkback radio show as a motif, Taylor is able to build up tension in the dangerous game of cat and mouse that Zoey is playing with her fellow killer/admirer. A key conversation, all spoken in hypotheticals, is one of the more gripping scenes in the book, all the more so because it is done from the confined quarters of the radio booth. Taylor then drops the first major surprise of the book by introducing the killer to Zoey earlier than expected, and their open conversation is indicative that not everything is as it seems.
Taylor’s clean line work, based on photographic sources that the artist takes himself, remains naturalistic and engaging. The addition of colour brings a bold new dimension to the book, which we didn’t think was possible after enjoying the greyscale imagery in the first volume so much. Jay Savage, filling in for series colourist Sylv Taylor on this issue and the next, recognises the strength of that original imagery, and his minimalist choice of colours reflects that. Savage’s ‘watercolour wash’ over the panels adds texture to Taylor’s world, yet his choice of shadow and tones is careful to emphasise the core strength of the character leads.
A Voice in the Dark: Get Your Gun is a series reinvigorated, and remains a clever blend of 1980s black comedy and serial killer drama. The reveal of Zoey’s counterpoint, if that is indeed who this new character is, marks a foil for an already interesting lead that challenges assumptions about comic book heroes. We hope that this is the first of many more of Taylor’s series, as things are starting to get hotter.
A Voice in the Dark: Get Your Gun #1 is released on 24 September 2014 from Top Cow/Image Comics.
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