Rachel Rising Vol. 1 The Shadow of Death

Title: Rachel Rising Volume 1 The Shadow of Death

Series: Monthly Ongoing

Publisher: Abstract Studio

Creative Team: 

            Writer & Artist: Terry Moore

Genre: Horror, Suspense

Rachel wakes up in a shallow grave.  She has no memory of how she got there or much of anything in the past couple days.  Her neck is bruised and her eyes are blood red where they should be white.  Rachel manages to find her way home.  She quickly enlists her Aunt Johnny and best friend Jet to help her try to unravel the mystery of what happened.  (If I ever make an anti-bucket list of things to avoid doing before I die, being buried alive will be at the top of it).  Rachel begins to wonder if she survived the incident that led to her burial or if she has died and come back.  If all that weren’t enough, Rachel keeps seeing a strange woman whose appearances always precede someone’s death.

This series is creepy.  It’s a smart kind of creepy.  These days in horror anyone can give you a jump scare.  It’s cheap and easy like a hot pocket.  Anyone can gross you out with the right sound or the right image (again, like a hot pocket).  Rachel Rising doesn’t try to give you gross, squishy, jump scare horror.  It is delivering something eerie, something that feels wrong and disturbing on a deeper level.  That is the kind of horror that I love.  It’s the kind of horror that’s much harder to pull off.  Moore delivers it like an old pro.  I don’t know if he’s written anything else in this genre before but he certainly has a handle on it.

Rachel is a little low on tact these days.

Aside from being great horror, Rachel Rising is an excellent example of how to positively portray women in comics.  In mainstream American comics, that’s sort of like finding a unicorn and a leprechaun having a splash fight in the fountain of youth.  Ok, it’s not quite that bad but it’s bad enough that finding a comic that features real women is still something to be applauded.  And by real women I mean, Terry Moore is not drawing ridiculously exaggerated girls who seem to be perpetually posing for Maxim.  But anyone who’s read Moore’s work before shouldn’t be surprised by his remarkable grasp on the female form.  It’s also the first comic I’ve reviewed that’s passed the Bechdel test.  And when I say pass, I mean it in the sense that Stephen Hawking would pass a high school algebra test. 

What is the Bechdel Test?  I’m so glad you asked.  Alison Bechdel is a comic artist/writer who wrote a comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For.  It ran from 1983 to 2008.  As I understand it, it’s on hiatus right now and still may be brought back.  In one installment, one of the characters says that she will not watch a movie unless it satisfies 3 rules.  One: The movie contains at least 2 female characters.  Two: Those two characters talk to each other.  Three: When they talk, they talk about something other than men.  It is absolutely ridiculous how few works of fiction can pass this seemingly simple test.  The test is all about drawing attention to the flagrant gender bias that exists in fiction.  That all being said Rachel Rising has 3 strong female leads who after 6 issues have only talked about relationships with men for a couple pages at most.

Beyond passing the Bechdel test I get the feeling that Terry Moore is purposely drawing a gender line in the sand for his characters.  Most of the men presented in the first volume of Rachel Rising are portrayed as degenerate in one way or another.  There is really only one male character so far portrayed as a decent human being and he was only present for a page or two.  Beyond that we are presented with abusive, rage-filled, possibly necrophilic men.  Moore even goes so far as to have all female dialogue in rounded word balloons and all male dialogue in rectangular.  I have my theories as to why this is but it would be rather spoiler filled.

Like they say boys speak in rectangles, girls speak in ovals.

Rachel Rising is the comic I never knew I always wanted.  I don’t know how long Terry Moore is intending the series to run but if subsequent volumes are as strong as the first I’m hoping for a long exciting run.  Do yourself a favor and pick up this series to get your October started off right.

Grade: A+