No. 1 With A Bullet

May 21, 2018
“Why’s the internet full of garbage people?” laments Nash Huang in this electrically drawn sci-fi graphic novel with a socially conscious message. As it happens, she’s only half-right: her whole world, both online and real life, is filled with lowlifes, haters, and downright villains. The settings are close enough to present day that it barely meets the cyberpunk trope of “10 minutes into the future,” with cybernetic contact lenses as the only example of advanced technology. Nash rockets from hapless media intern to reviled internet celebrity when she’s a target of revenge porn, losing her girlfriend, her job, and her privacy. Then, a stalker starts scrawling bloody proclamations of doom across her apartment walls. Aided by eccentric police detective Grover, Nash’s search for the creep leads her to Los Angeles’s macabre Museum of Death and an abandoned amusement park, where grisly hallucinations make her doubt her own sanity. Nash is being led into a trap, but by whom—and why? The adventure is chilling, and the plot revolves around timely topics like cyberstalking, doxing, and toxic masculinity, but suffers from a clichéd climax straight from Slasher Film 101 followed by a simplistic moral. Corona’s fine artwork blunts disappointments in the script—his strong figure work and kinetic panel design are in the style of Paul Pope or Sam Kieth, and the brilliant, bright colors light up the pages like neon. Nash’s tale rides like a roller coaster and skids to a bumpy stop, but the view is lovely along the way.