A Vicious Circle #1: Beautiful but Shallow

Shawn Thacker has a family. And the only way he gets to stay with them is if he keeps a man named Ferris chained in his basement, unable to kill. It sounds bizarre, but that is how A Vicious Circle #1 opens. And in Tomlin and Bermejo’s time travel story, it’s really not the strangest thing at work.

A Vicious Circle #1 starts with an ordinary weekend morning at the Thacker’s. Shawn’s son Tommy wants to go fishing. Shawn heads into the basement to retrieve the poles. And that’s when we get our first look at Ferris, chained to the wall. Shawn feeds him a raw egg. Ferris asks if Shawn ever worries about what might happen if Shawn killed him. A few pages later Shawn returns from a work errand, expecting to pick up Tommy to go fishing. Instead, Shawn finds his son and wife injured and Ferris gone. It’s a few pages later when we get the closest to a direct explanation for what’s going to happen in the rest of the issue: when Tommy dies, Shawn is going to be pulled out of this time and place.

The rest of the issue is a non-stop grudge match hop through time. Shawn and Ferris are tethered (via barely explained means) such that any time one of them kills somebody, both of them get yanked to another point in time.

A Vicious Circle #1 is built on a fascinating concept of time travel and it’s intriguing to consider how that can affect a deadly rivalry. Unfortunately, consideration is about all we get. Tomlin offers no real explanation for the time travel shenanigans going on here. Shawn makes a vague reference to how he was sent from the future to destroy “a machine of death and destruction” and was confronted by Ferris who was sent from another future to turn the device on. And then “worlds collided. Shit got bad.” Tomlin doesn’t even make clear that it’s time-travel-by-murder, leaving that up to the reader to figure out on their own.

Character development in A Vicious Circle #1 is likewise limited. Tomlin tells us nothing about Ferris, and while more information may be forthcoming, he comes across here as a homicidal caricature–murdering his way through time as Shawn chases him for revenge. We learn enough about Shawn’s family life that we root for him in a revenge scenario, but there’s absolutely no depth here in a narrative sense.

With a relatively weak narrative, A Vicious Circle #1 is left to stand or fall on its visual presentation. Fortunately, Bermejo’s work here is stellar. While the story fails to engage beyond the most superficial of levels after the opening pages, the art absolutely captivates. The black-and-white style of the opening pages grounds Shawn in the ordinary and the mundane while adding a greater emotional depth to his relationship with his family. It’s very effective, adding more to the main character than any of Tomlin’s dialogue or narration. This sort of visual establishment of mood and emotion continues for the rest of the issue, with Bermejo’s work having to be the sole point of reference for how we should feel at any given moment.

Bermejo is also critical in helping us keep track of what’s going on. That sounds like an obvious statement because comics are a visual medium. But the issue jumps through more than 12 time periods, spending as little as one panel in some of them. For an extended period, there is almost no text to help establish anything–it’s just Shawn and Ferris in different settings lunging at each other. But Bermejo keeps each one visually distinct which ultimately makes the transitioning between time periods work. Bermejo uses a different art style for every time period, whether it’s color choice, shading level, line thickness, photorealism vs cartoon, etc. This proves crucial because of how fast Shawn jumps through time. When four panels in a row are from different time periods, the visual distinctiveness keeps the story progression understandable and easy to follow.