I’m going to do something atypical here and unabashedly gush because I knew The Phantom of the Opera would make a palpable killing (literally and figuratively). I’ve long been a fan of Tyler Patrick Boss’ writing with titles like You’ll Do Bad Things. Additionally, I met Martin Simmonds at Fan Expo Canada and was immediately enthralled with his art. It has aesthetic whispers of Dave McKean a la Arkham Asylum: A Serious House of Serious Earth (one of my all-time favorite Batman comic books). He was doing a commissioned sketch from his work on The Department of Truth and I was in a trance watching him manipulate light and shadow for his abstract and expressionist art style. Needless to say, I was gleeful when I learned about their team-up on this project which Boss shared with me at New York Comic Con.
Now, after following along issues #1 and #2 and getting to review issue 3, I can proudly declare that said hype is real and this exceeded my expectations.
Since this is a Skybound Entertainment/Universal Monsters IP, the duo took the cinematic and tonal foundations from the 1943 movie and funneled it through a modernist lens, albeit with overarching homages in this graphic novel. It’s a masterful interplay of synergizing old and new together and it works effortlessly well.
Last we read, issue #2 had us delving into the problems between Christine Daaé and her jealous understudy, Megan, who was attempting to sabotage her rise to prima donna status. Instead, she was lured to the roof of the opera house and killed by the Phantom (Erik). A blood soaked rose is what we’re left in the final pages as the Phantom makes this his ominous declaration that if anyone interferes with Christine’s rise to fame, they would suffer his swift wrath.
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Issue #3 sees Raoul (Christine’s love interest, albeit tenuous at the moment) work with the Paris police to seek out this spectre of a criminal. Unfortunately, they set their sights on the wrong person and accuse tenor Anatole Garron and arrest him. But he’s eventually released due to ‘insufficient evidence’… also the police (ultimately) realize that the true murderer still roams free.
And free he is: the Phantom’s grip on Christine (who still naively believes that he is an ‘Angel’ of music offering guidance) tightens as he grooms, controls, and gaslights her into preparing for her performance of Don Juan of which he orchestrated by threatening Maestro Villeneuve to swap out the opera’s current run of Faust, thereby ensuring Christine as the lead.
Luana Vecchio variant cover
It’s now a game of who can outwit who as the opera house and police conspire to take down the Phantom with a trap…but we are left with grisly and gruesome results. Let’s just say that they thought they could manipulate our eerie spectre and lure him out of the shadows by trapping Christine in her room and swapping out her with Mme. Rossellini as the lead vocalist instead. Instead, a most infamous and iconic chandelier scene occurs, befalls the opera house, and welp, all we’re seeing now is a haze of crimson bloodshed.
I cannot tell you the chills I had while reading this.
I was swept up in this timeless tale because the beats of every element was so fine-tuned: the sense of foreboding thanks to the calculated pacing from Boss as we know danger lurks around the corner. Meanwhile Simmonds captures the intimacy and intrusion with tight shots between Christine and the Phantom to wide pans of the bystanders. There’s something so tragic and titillating about how the terror is unleashed… how it oscillates between eerie and elegant. My favorite scenes are when the light literally emanates from Christine as our songbird serenades us with her vocals; and the tragedy of the chandelier scene—instead of showcasing explicit pain, we’re shown a cascade of roses which depict the fall of the massive light fixture.
Above all else, we’re taken on a roller-coaster of lust, control, and violence… luring the reader in with an almost smoldering embrace to the sudden release and drift into the dark void feels all-at-once seductive and scary.
Ultimately, what more can I say except that issue #4 cannot come out soon enough.
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