Stillwater, Volume 1: Rage Rage Review (Chip Zdarsky, Ramon K. Perez)

Down-on-his-luck Daniel receives a letter informing him of a great-grand-aunt passing and leaving him something in her will. So he heads out to the small town where she lived: Stillwater. Except it’s a small town with a secret: something happened there many years ago and the town’s inhabitants stopped physically aging and can’t die, so long as they stay within the town limits. Any injuries they have get healed super-quick, Wolverine-style. And now that Daniel knows the town’s secret, he can never leave…

Chip Zdarsky and Ramon K. Perez’s new series Stillwater starts promisingly enough with an intriguing Twilight Zone-esque premise that quickly devolves into a rather tedious small scale power struggle amongst dull characters.

Zdarsky initially sets up the story well but, beyond that first issue, pretty much treads water while he repeats the concept over and over while introducing the cast. And I wouldn’t have minded ignoring any kind of story if the characters were memorable or fun but unfortunately they’re not. There’s the perpetually puzzled protagonist, the caring single mom, the meathead cop, the cartoonishly evil judge, and the rest are blandly inoffensive whatevers; I don’t care about any of them.

I suppose there is a story of sorts - deciding whether to reveal themselves to the world after so long/how Daniel will escape the town - but I didn’t find it very engaging. And I’m not bothered too much about the mystery of how something like this could happen - the answer will likely be aliens or magic or some such bullshit.

Some of the details are thoughtful like how to punish those who can’t be killed or injured, and the intricacies of how the town could continue to be undiscovered by outside authorities for so long. And Perez’s art is decent though not his best - I think that’s because he’s not really given the chance to draw anything too remarkable or eye-catching; it’s just ordinary people talking in ordinary settings.

Stillwater, Volume 1: Rage Rage starts fairly well and has its occasional moments but mostly it’s too much table-setting, even for a first volume. I get that Zdarsky wants to set up a long-running creator-owned title here but you’ve got to give the reader a reason to want to read a long-running series by giving them a stronger story than the one offered up here.