Handwritten Entertainment 2019
Written & Lettered by Shawn Gabborin
Illustrated by Sergio Rios
Coloured by Rosa Colon
After tracking down the Sharksquatch, have Chance, Val, and Chief gotten themselves in over their heads? Blood, guts, and lots of insides on the outside are waiting for you..........
Sometimes you have to be careful with ideas and story's like this one that you don't go too far over into pure kitsch. Too silly and you veer into not being taken seriously as a writer, at least from my point of view. What Shawn manages to do here though is take a silly concept of a cryptid that doesn't exist and make it into something that we want to see more of. I will say it's akin to any of those made for SyFy movie, only better. Better is better and it has this personality , walk, personality, talk, with personality, smile, with personality, charm, personality, love, personality.
I can't give anything away here but I will say this, Shawn blew my mind with the story within these pages. I wasn't expecting nor prepared for what was going to happen at all. I was going to say something else but when you read this, and you really damn well should, you'll understand what I am talking about. Just the overall way that this is being told and how we get to see the events unfold grabs you by the ears and doesn't let go. Strong and interesting beyond belief this is what we all want to see in our comedic horror and make no mistake there is this dark adult black humour to this as well.
The story & plot development that we see through the sequence of events unfolding before us as well as how the reader learns information is extremely well done. The way we follow the characters through their adventure and see their actions add this action/thriller aspect to the book. The character development that we see is phenomenal and as the the book keeps moving forward we see more and more what makes these people tick and the motivations for what's behind their actions. The pacing is strong and solid as it takes us through the pages and the myriad of twists and turns along the way. All of which work so seamlessly together as they are weave through each other to create a spectacular ebb & flow to the book. The overall structure of the book is done extremely well and it nicely showcases Shawn's skills as a writer.
The interiors here are interesting for sure. The creativity and imagination on display in bringing this to life is fantastic. I mean creating a new mythical cryptid is a dream gig right and it comes across beautifully on the page. The utilisation of the varying weights to bring out the attention to detail here is fantastic. When we see backgrounds being utilised in the panels they do such wonders in expanding the moments, bring us a sense of depth perception, scale and size and scope to the story. So I would like to see them further utilised in more panels. Also thank you for giving Chance that masculine makeover heh or at least kind of stripping him down for action it's nice to see this on a guy these days. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels shows a solid eye for storytelling. The colour work is nice. We could do with seeing more variation in the hues and tones of the colours we see to create the shading, highlights and shadows. This would benefit the musculature we see greatly.
There is a lot going on here and I have to say that the way Shawn is able to really bring this about and keep it all moving forward without feeling like it's too crowded is sensational. This is pure unadulterated fun and if you want to call it a guilty pleasure then go right ahead because this is definitely in that category alright. You can head over to Handwritten Entertainment at https://squareup.com/store/Handwritten-Entertainment/ to order this and more.