The Butcher’s Boy #2: Food Poisoning

Some meat is bad to eat. That could be the lesson at the center of horror series The Butcher’s Boy. And it’s a lesson that every character might be learning as the The Butcher’s Boy #2 marches inevitably toward the horror that readers already know is ahead for them.

Chris, Frankie, Hans, Emma, Alan, and Shyla are stuck in a motel following Chris’ car breaking down at the end of the first issue. The Butcher’s Boy #2 jumps between the stressful present and a much friendlier hangout between the characters two months earlier as they play Mario Kart. The flashbacks demonstrate that there is (or was) an actual friendship beneath this dysfunctional group. In the present, everyone who ate burgers in the previous issue is suffering from a bout of food poisoning. In the midst of this, Hans comes upon a notebook full of the Butcher’s Boy’s horrific story.

The Butcher’s Boy #2 successfully maintains the tension from the first issue. The Butcher’s Boy #1’s flashforward hangs over the characters. They’re still headed for gruesome situations, The Butcher’s Boy #2 takes the first obvious steps toward that bloody horror, but Walker successfully buries that card until almost halfway through the issue. Every time the apparent food poisoning gets brought up, Walker switches to either a flashback or a hostile exchange in the present hat distracts from that concern.

The complicated relationship that the first issue spent so much time establishing makes these quick shifts in story feel perfectly natural and an effective way to further build the anticipation already present coming into the issue. At no point does any of this feel like padding to prolong the wait for the true horror elements to rear their head.

The horror imagery in The Butcher’s Boy #2 is restrained compared to the first issue. The Butcher’s Boy’s writings are accompanied by three disturbing red on white panels, and Greenwood delivers a shock at the end. But the growing sensation that everything is wrong and getting worse is largely communicated by Simpson’s coloring. It begins with small panels here and there where a character is set against a background of pink and magenta swirls. Though there isn’t an obvious pattern to the swirls, Greenwood keeps the swirls orderly–it’s not a psychedelic effect where the colors bleed into each other. The disturbance, for lack of a better word, radiates around and from the character in that panel. Ultimately the color scheme bleeds out to the entire page, reinforcing the issue’s major shocking image on the final pages.

The captions that tell the story from the Butcher’s Boy’s book are irregular, like torn paper. Their color doesn’t quite match the book’s pages. But Brosseau does keep the style between the book and the captions consistent–an uneven, scratchy looking handwritten font.