FCBD: Bountiful Garden #1: No One’s Picking Up The Phone

Somber, watercolor-styled, emotional to the point of expressionism, the colors, shadows and lines that inhabit Bountiful Garden tell of a deep chilling story, of a crew lost in space and how their anxieties inhabit and splatter through the pages. While this first issue works as pure set up and exposition for the reader to know something is to come over our crew, it’s the best type of set up possible. In every line, we learn something about the anxieties and inner world of these characters, and Weir’s script doesn’t lose a moment to remind us there are real stakes in here, real veiled terror.

And one of the most clever parts of it is the terror begins not in the monster, or the danger, but in the isolation, in the hopes broken, in the unknowness. In fears that we can recognize too often in our every day, in “what if everything that can happen to us is out of our control?”. And it slowly turns a tide from there.

That exploration of a book focused on characters and emotions has the most astounding and intriguing visuals accompanying, as muted colors, dark shadows and metallic desperation mix with nature light panels and marooned alien worlds. The journey that Bountiful Garden puts the reader through, both in term of exploring its crew and its mysterious world, is nothing sort of perfect, and will delight any fan of sci-fi and terror that recognizes what genre comics sometimes do: explore what’s inside us through the imaginary, strange, outside.