Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: alex de campi, Carla Speed McNeill, image comics, No Mercy

No Mercy Is The Most Bingeable TPB Releasing This Week

Published Tue, 15 Sep 2015 16:30:34 -0500

No Mercy was a comic that I had the pleasure of doing an advance review of in its first issue and I found it very eye-opening, interesting, horrifying, and what's quite rare: unique. Written by the ever daring Alex de Campi and illustrated with great effect by conspirator Carla Speed MacNeil, the comic follows a group of incoming Princeton freshmen going on a kind of bonding meet and greet trip together to Mexico.

In the style of effective exaggeration (or possibly not an exaggeration at all depending on your view of how young people tend to think and behave right now) you might recognize from de Campi's Grindhouse comics, these teens are obsessed with their looks, their social media (especially that), their interaction with each other and posturing for attention, and the change they are facing in social identity as they get ready for college life. McNeil's artwork is just so perfect for this series because it's not at all what you'd expect from an extreme horror-drama like she and de Campi have dreamed up. It's almost manga-cute occasionally, complete with thinking and talking in emoticons, but that's just scratching the surface on how a superficial perspective fairs in a truly savage environment. McNeil knows how to wrench your emotions with facial expressions of suffering, horror, and self-pity, and equally make you aware of the clownishness of the characters.

And that's where the binge-reading starts. You don't really like any of these characters that much, and that's important. If you did, you could barely handle the kind of extreme suffering we'll see them go through (if they survive) and even worse–the extreme brutality we see them exact upon each other. That's not to say that there aren't some redeeming features that arise and surprise you, but even those will be tested and you, the reader, will know the exact point at which those gentler virtues fail.

[This image now reminds me of the Game of Thrones meme where you see the kids as actors before the show was filmed. Don't they all look so nice here? Hope things work out for them…]

In my review of the first issue, I likened reading it to watching a reality show where the human subjects don't know they are being filmed, and that sense of invasiveness, that close-up view of human behavior continues. It's an unflinching gaze and you do, beat by beat get the sense that the universe is coiling up to launch another wave of reality at these overly coddled, certainly naive, outrageously selfish kids. And believe me, de Campi and McNeil are going to make sure there is no mercy for them.

I've gotten a sneak peek at issues #5 and #6 that are coming out this winter after a hiatus, and I was horribly delighted by those issues, too. It's very hard to maintain such vise-like tension in a comic over more than a few issues, but de Campi and McNeil are spiraling into a profoundly gripping direction that expands upon the world of the comic in the next few issues. I binge-read those issues even faster than I sped through the first four issues on my re-read.

You know a comic is managing to punch through your own apathy as a reader, and the cushioning effects of your own fairly sedentary life, when you started exclaiming out loud while reading it. Whether it's the desert, the coyotes, the injuries that these kids faced when their bus hurtled over a cliff, or their own haplessness, the sheer pace of deadly threats in this comic will have you reacting and reading through your fingers the way you look at the screen of a particularly gruesome film. Some of my highlights were, "No, they did NOT do that!" (meaning de Campi and McNeil), "Disgusting!", "For f*ck's sake!" and you can imagine the rest.

I think de Campi and McNeil have really accomplished something interesting with No Mercy--it's a hell of a compelling comic to experience, but it's also a relentless commentary on the way we think and live. It's a highly effective package of horror and social satire. The collected edition of issues #1-4 arrives this week from Image at their bargain rate of $9.99 and I envy those of you who are going to read it all at once and for the first time. Just make sure you don't have other plans when you open the book—there's no way you'll put it down until your finished. And then you'll be waiting for #5.

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