Red Roots is unlike anything I’ve read in comics, which is both exciting and bold. Written and drawn by Lorenzo De Felici, who last did double duty on Kroma, Red Roots #1 brings two stories, intercut with no discernible connective tissue yet. In one, there is intense and exciting action, and in the other, a macabre mystery that’s as weird as they come. It’s a comic that made me immediately want to pick up issue #2 when I put it down, in part because I can’t imagine what new delights are in store for readers.
Red Roots #1 opens on a chainlink fence cast in red light, and through a hole, a man walks away from us in pouring rain, holding a gun. It’s a striking visual that plays with foreground and background, mood and atmosphere, that’s instantly intriguing. From there, we follow their break-in of a heavily guarded facility and the vicious violence they’re willing to bring to the unsuspecting criminal types inside. In a full-page splash, we see the killer spattered in blood with two dead bodies at his feet. This guy means business and knows how to kill.
On the very next page is another full-page splash where we meet a school teacher giving a student a hard time. The juxtaposition is striking, with the tone changing to something more lighthearted and warm. We then follow this teacher to the teacher’s lounge, where she discusses parents. A mundane sort of scene for a mundane life. By the time the story reaches this teacher feeding her cats, we cut back to the killer, who works his way through the building by killing and gassing more unsuspecting guards.
The opening page is gripping.
Credit: Image
If you’re impatient, you might find the crosscutting frustrating since there are no answers as to how these stories relate, but I found it somehow riveting. The not knowing kept me pushing forward to learn what each story was really about, with the teacher’s mundane life getting quite juicy when she finds a human head in her closet. Again, De Felici does a fabulous job with full-page splashes to amp up the weird and scary, culminating in the head reveal.
Something else that works well with this issue is the pacing. The tone of each story is vastly different, amping you up with action and violence in one, and then slowing things down into a morbid mystery in the other. The lack of answers is somewhat rewarded when the two tales directly connect via dialogue, though it’s still unclear by the end how they truly connect. Instead, De Felici drops an impossible-to-guess cliffhanger, further cementing this book as something far more than genre storytelling.
The juxtaposition isn’t just about every story, but also about the art. While De Felici doesn’t change up his style per se, the action is exciting and easy to follow. It’s inventive choreography. Meanwhile, the severed heads are creepy and weird, with interesting close-up framing.
Add in the great lettering by Rus Watoon, and there’s very little that doesn’t work here. Sure, the mundanity of some of the scenes with the teacher could try some patience, but Watoon helps make these scenes feel genuine.
Red Roots #1 is a striking and confident debut that thrives on mystery and mood. Lorenzo De Felici leans into uncertainty, trusting readers to sit with the tension as two seemingly unrelated stories unfold side by side. The result is hypnotic, shifting between brutal action and unsettling quiet with ease. While it withholds answers, it replaces them with intrigue and unforgettable imagery, making it hard to put down and even harder to stop thinking about once it ends. Red Roots is a bold, exciting, and visually striking comic.
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