The Unsound Review (Cullen Bunn, Jack T. Cole)

It’s Ashli’s first day as a nurse at Saint Cascia, a mental health clinic in a poor part of the city - and it might be her last. Following a riot by the patients, Ashli and the rest of the staff must escape the increasingly surreal labyrinth of the hospital by putting their trust in the mysterious patient with a paper plate mask - who somehow seems to know Ashli quite well…

Cullen Bunn does hack horror comics like no one else out there but The Unsound is the first one of his I’ve read in a while that I didn’t outright dislike for its sheer unoriginality and storytelling laziness. Not that it’s a great comic either - it’s not - but it’s an interesting failure regardless.

The story builds nicely to begin with - foreshadowing the significance of razor blades, the strange atmosphere of Saint Cascia that makes you wonder who the patients and who the professionals are - before basically giving up and descending into a chase storyline interspersed with barely-coherent weirdness seemingly for the sake of weirdness.

I liked a number of aspects of the story - the Lovecraftian hospital and what it represents, the Idiot Prince (the man in the paper plate mask), and how Ashli’s past tied into it all. Jack T. Cole’s art is also surprisingly effective as horror partly because it’s not the usual treatment of too much darkness or generic monsters/blood’n’guts; all of the characters are humanoid, the designs are of everyday things but in unusual contexts, and the visuals in general are bright and colourful.

Though interesting in themselves, these aspects never really came together in a satisfying way - the explanation for it all is vague and underwritten and the surrealism is gratuitous. I feel like there’s a great horror story to be had with the concept of sanity and what that constitutes, and Bunn has assembled an intriguing assortment of pieces to enliven such a story, but it’s not realised well here unfortunately.

The Unsound is not a terrible comic and might be worth a look for horror fans, and good on Bunn for having a decent stab at a difficult and ambitious story, but it’s also not a particularly good one with underdeveloped characters, uninspired set pieces and a rushed finale that left me feeling disappointed and underwhelmed.