I Walk With Monsters Review (Paul Cornell, Sally Cantirino)

SPOILERS

After escaping a nightmarish home life, teenage runaway Jacey meets shape-shifter David and the unlikely pair become wandering vigilantes, hunting down child molesters. Until one day they come across a political campaign, triggering traumatic memories in Jacey. Her brother Jake was abducted years ago by this very politician and never seen again. And now she will have her revenge…

I Walk With Monsters starts really well, gets shaky in the middle and eventually falls apart by the end. It’s still a decent comic though with a lot to recommend it.

The storytelling style is very clever and creative. Word balloons are blocked out by text boxes summarising the conversation, ie. “well-rehearsed charming details”, glossing over banal speech for the reader’s benefit, which is definitely appreciated, and it’s also fun to see this playful approach.

Names and faces are blurred out in red scratches to underline Jacey’s repressed memories. The politician looms much larger than he really is, his exaggerated size underlining Jacey’s fear of him and what he represents as well as showing her younger age when she first saw him and was a smaller person.

Panels turn to static when Jacey’s mind stops her from remembering horrible memories, and David’s keen sense of smell, when picking up on different people’s scents, is depicted as multi-coloured lines showing those people’s movements.

The first couple issues really draw you in and set the story up beautifully. And I liked that, later on, when Jacey confronts the politician, it doesn’t play out at all predictably.

Then things get less brilliant from the middle part on. David’s backstory and motivations are unconvincing and mystifying. How he became a shape-shifter is lazy and convenient, as is why he decides to pair up with Jacey. I don’t know why we were shown Jacey’s fascination with NASA as this has no bearing on anything, besides the obvious “escape” motif.

That final issue really irked me. How on earth did the pair of them escape from the woods after being surrounded by the authorities? It doesn’t seem possible that David would have time to escape, lure the politician back, and have that final fight, all without him or Jacey being picked up by a single cop! Also, why did the politician turn into a monster - was he always able to do that? And why did he need to go to Jacey in his monster form in the woods?

It doesn’t really make sense, and ending the story on a generic punch-em-up was a disappointing way to end things. I really thought that Paul Cornell had something more interesting in mind, particularly given how well he’d handled this unusual story up to that point, so to see it culminate in something so generic and dull felt very anticlimactic.

Sally Cantirino’s art is decent if unspectacular. David’s wolf form looked like something I’d seen from BPRD and quite a bit of this book’s art reminded me of James Harren’s work on that series, not least because of the wandering girl/monsters angle too.

I Walk With Monsters isn’t a bad horror story, and it’s certainly got some great moments in it, it just isn’t consistently good throughout. Still, it’s worth a look if you’re a horror comics fan.