Basilisk #1 Review

Writer: Cullen Bunn / Artist: Jonas Scharf / Boom! Studios The cold open to Basilisk #1, from Cullen Bunn and Jonas Scharf, is one of the most visually engrossing opening pages of a comic I’ve seen. The hard contrast between sepia tones tessellated between a subdued blue create this haunting juxtaposition of landscapes creates such a chilling atmosphere from the get. Scharf really put his best foot forward in cultivating the world. Past the open page, we get a vague sense of what’s going on. A group of five mysterious strangers have descended down to a small town and committed an act of violence, and then we pivot immediately to a different point of view character who the story is actually anchored around.

Basilisk, according to the solicit, is about “The Chimera,” a group of five individuals with vaguely supernatural powers and specifically about Regan, a defector from the group, who teams up with a victim from her past to confront the other four. And that’s mostly what the first issue revolves around is this staging of vague conflicts. Bunn does a very good job at creating an ominous atmosphere and a sense of foreboding. Hannah, the aforementioned point of view pivot and the character who captures Regan to kickstart the plot, has a couple of nice soundbites but doesn’t feel quite fleshed out as a character. Of course, relying on archetypal frameworks is not a bad thing, it’s just that in this particular case it feels like it errs a little too much on the vague end of the…