The very title, Seance In The Asylum, is strong enough to kick off a story, but with horror maestro Clay McLeod Chapman at the helm, it’s a no-brainer purchase this Halloween season. Set in Rochester, New York in 1865, the first issue proposes an insane asylum that is open to the fact that its patients may not be sick but possessed. Or worse!
The first thing you’ll notice with Seance In The Asylum #1 is Leonardo Marcello Grassi’s style. It has an old-school, European comics look that suits the time period. The thin lines and rougher look create a sense of sharp edges and danger. Grassi uses different methods to create weird vibes when things get spooky, like stretching faces or scratching out panels with a pen.
Maura Gulma’s colors cast the book in browns and muddier tones, creating a sense of dismay and sorrow. This is not a happy story, and Gulma makes you believe that from the start. Thanks to both artists, there’s a dark gloom in this book.
A frightening vibe.
Credit: Dark Horse
Seance In The Asylum #1 opens with strange men in suit jackets badgering Miss Wilkinson, who sits in a chair, almost doll-like. Their questions torment her. The story then cuts to Wilkinson riding in a carriage as she reads a letter to hear from the asylum. They need her help, and we soon learn not every doctor there agrees with her method.
A chunk of this issue is devoted to Wilkinson getting a tour of the asylum. We meet a few of the patients, and they’re not well. Handy patient ID captions help suss out their level of insanity. Chapman uses these to create a sense of danger. He also fleshes out the complexity of the staff and how they don’t necessarily see eye to eye with supernatural means of therapy.
The lettering is good, although I did find it hard to read Wilkinson’s letter in the captions. Outside of that, the lettering in word balloons plays around with translucency and shape to add to the weirdness of the seance.
As far as Wilkinson, she’s a bit of a mystery. Chapman doesn’t flesh her out so much as to have her react to strange dreams of the men in suit jackets badgering her. She’s serious and a bit forlorn, but it’s hard to gauge who she is after this first issue.
Seance in the Asylum reads as if Edgar Allan Poe wrote a comic. It’s dark, moody, and a bit disturbed. There’s a strangeness that grips you while establishing a very dangerous proposition with its cliffhanger.
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