Stillwater #1 Review Buries its Lede

Writer: Chip Zdarksy / Artist: Ramon K. Pérez / Image The opening of Stillwater #1 ultimately belies how weird the series actually manages to get by the end of the issue, which I suppose isn’t too surprising since this is Chip Zdarsky we’re talking about here. But even knowing the basic premise that there is a small town where no one dies, I was still very much shocked by the new horror series and how it interpreted the concept, although I will say that there were a few detours to get that fascination. There is a familiarity in the opening pages where our protagonist Daniel gets called into his boss’s office to discuss an HR incident and we get the gist of his character: dedicated, diligent worker with a strong sense of honor but an equally hard head to match. Classic rogue journalist type (or rather journalist-adjacent type) since he was a designer for the magazine before he got fired. Thankfully, he can’t find time to sulk as he gets a mysterious invitation to the titular town where he discovers that not everything is as it seems.

However, it takes quite a while to actually get to Stillwater and to the crux of the actual premise, which mind you is plenty fascinating especially in its execution. Zdarsky has a good sense of pacing and dialog and Pérez’s artwork is a perfect tonal fit for the story. The problem is that the lede is buried under a little too much exposition and and it takes over half of the length of the issue to get to the meat and potatoes of the story. As…