News From The Fallout #1 is written by Chris Condon and published by Image Comics. Artwork is by Jeffrey Alan Love and letters by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou.
News From The Fallout #1 is available from today, in print and on digital platforms where all good comic books are sold. Grab your digital copy from Amazon Comixology UK right here.
Synopsis
In 1962, Nevada, a nuclear bomb test goes horribly awry and unleashes a contaminate into the atmosphere that turns people rotten. Otis Fallows, a private in the U.S. Army who is present for the test and is the only known survivor, flees the secret army base in search of a safe haven—but does such a place exist?
Review
Some of the best and most effective comic books manage to do a lot with very little, and Chris Condon’s new miniseries, News From The Fallout, is no exception.
There is an unrelenting brutality to News From The Fallout that leaks out of every panel. Jeffrey Alan Love’s choice to go for a very harsh art style that relies solely on blacks, greys and whites to create a horrific atmosphere is so perfectly realised here. As the dialogue is very sparse, Love’s illustrations have to do 90% of the work and considering how dark and bleak the story is, I cannot imagine this comic being presented any other way.
Every panel oozes with a sense of aggression that amps up more and more with every page. It’s truly unforgiving with its feeling of desolation as images of screaming soldiers, brooding silhouettes, and mutated creatures burn themselves into the pages of this comic and will stay with you long after reading it.
The storytelling from Condon is very simple and to the point, which for a comic such as this is ideal. It throws you in at the literal deep end and expects you to go along with it, which is made easier by the visual storytelling on display. Some comics can suffer from the same issues as TV and film, whereby they become overly reliant on the writing and dialogue to explain/tell the narrative at hand. News From The Fallout is refreshing in the sense that it has very little dialogue in the first place, and uses its harsh/stylised artwork to do the heavy lifting instead.
Despite the artwork being as abrasive as it is, it doesn’t forget to include finer details to help push the emotional, character-driven side of the narrative. For instance, the simple decision to have Private Fallows, our protagonist for the series, wear a gas mask makes him instantly recognisable among the carnage and nuclear fallout that fills the sky, but also makes him oddly sympathetic compared to the unmasked generals and soldiers whose aggressively sharp facial features do nothing but greatly exagerate the fear and pain of the situation at hand. Fallows’ mask, on the other hand, has a sad, almost innocent appearance to it, making him, in a way, a more relatable character than any of the aforementioned soldiers.
What Condon and Love have created here is nothing short of astonishing. It’s hands down one of the most relentlessly dreary and atmospheric comics I’ve read in years, as it comes out of the gate with a confident sprint as opposed to a light jog. It’s an intense read, but one you certainly don’t want to miss.
Verdict
News From The Fallout is a bleak and visceral read that is heavily reliant on visual storytelling in the best possible way. It’s a comic that will grip you from page one and never let you go.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
