Daisy Chain #1 - Page1 Comics

DAISY CHAIN No. 1, July 2024

For those horror fans and fear fiends who enjoy just plenty of implied gratuitous violence taking place within their comic books without actually seeing buckets of blood splattered all over the place, then Alfred Paige and Mike Lynch’s Issue One of “Daisy Chain” should be right up their alley. In fact, the lack of body parts, internal organs and mutilated corpses actually helps make this comic’s narrative all the more intriguingly impactive, as it leaves the audience’s imagination to fill in some pretty disturbing blanks – such as just how the titular character fillets a strung out Johnny Vito on her bed.

Equally as well done is just how quickly the co-creators manage to drop the reader neck-deep in mass murder by rather cleverly setting out Jessica Frazer’s homicidal stall using just a couple of nicely worded paragraphs at this comic’s beginning. Such a technique might seem a little brusque to some bibliophiles. But it means that the authors can instead show just how deadly a seductress the socialite can be, without unnecessarily slowing down the publication’s pace by way of flashbacks or protracted backstory; “He has been in Jessica’s employ for years and knows where all the bodies are buried, burned and boiled.”

Also adding an extra dimension to this twenty-two-page periodical’s plot is the appearance of Station City cops James Hogan and Chris Rynne, who together provide some semblance of lawful order to its gory proceedings. Indeed, the pair of police detectives even manage to inject a fair amount of humour into its rather sobering storyline by comparing the smell of a criminal’s lifeless cadaver to one of their wives’ unpalatable meatloaf dinners.

Ultimately however, this sort of book debatably lives or dies by its artwork, and Igor Kurilin is clearly more than up to the challenge. Of particular note is the Ukrainian illustrator's marvellous use of colour throughout this comic. The predominantly black and white panels imbue everything with a palpable ‘film noir’ feel, so whenever there is a splash of colour, such as the femme fatale’s red lipstick, a serial killer’s mark, a dirty bedsheet or plain human ichor, it immediately attracts the attention.

The regular cover art of "DAISY CHAIN" #1 by Igor Kurilin