Mix Picks: Midnight Vista #1
Creepy and Engaging. To me, that’s the way every scary summertime story should be. Well, summer’s over but the latest from Aftershock, Midnight Vista, gave me that same type of feeling. I think that as I read this series during the fall, I’ll be able to keep that summertime vibe in the months ahead.
This series introduces us to Oliver Flores, a child of divorced parents. As the series opens, we get to overhear an entirely unpleasant back and forth conversation between the feuding parents. Anyone who’s ever been either a witness to or a part of that type of family argument knows how rotten it can be. Even though the boy, and maybe the readers, want to ignore the verbal fight, writer Eliot Rahal captures it realistically. It’s almost as if he’s established a covenant with the readers right away, so that you trust him to take you on a journey through the rest of the comic.
The story proceeds and veers into fantastical territory pretty quickly. The conceit seems to be that the boy was abducted by aliens and arrives back in town years later. But longtime readers will no doubt be wary, as Rahal seems like a writer with a few tricks up his sleeve.
As they always do, Aftershock includes a page with brief bios on the creatives. It’s a great service they provide to fans. I find it allows me, as a reader, to learn a little bit about the folks behind the story.
Clara Meath, a SCAD trained artist, provides the art. She’s a good storyteller and imbues her characters with a lot of emotion. Both Meath and Rahal co-created this project. I learned she’s been published before in a Scout Comics series and has published several mini-comics.
There’s a creepy menace introduced into the story too. I expect more will be revealed in issue #2, but the set-up is there. I am eager to learn more about the “bad guys”. And it might just be me, but I got a Buckaroo Banzai vibe during the last few pages of the story.
All in all, it’s a fun debut issue. I look forward to peeling back the layers of this story and discovering what really happened to Oliver Flores and where he’s been all these years.