By Zack Quaintance — It’s always nice when a group of rising creators gets together to tell a new story, and that’s exactly what we have here with Undone by Blood #1, a new series launching in February from AfterShock Comics. Writing this new book, we have the team of Zac Thompson and Lonnie Nadler, who led the X-Men event that preceded the House of X/Powers of X launch (Age of X-Man, to be exact), but are perhaps best known (around this site, anyway) for their excellent creator-owned books, including The Dregs, Come Into Me, and Her Infernal Descent. 

Joining that duo is Sami Kivela, a rising artist who has made great subject matter choices that he has subsequently hit out of the park. Kivela’s work first came to my attention with the 1970’s Detroit supernatural detective story Abbott (a Saladin Ahmed-penned comic put out by BOOM!), and it caught my eye again with last year’s Christian Ward-written comic, Machine Gun Wizards, which combines prohibition and magic. Kivela is joined on this new book by Jason Wordie, who is a natural fit to add the perfect moody palettes needed to really heighten the ambient linework Kivela lays down for this title.

What’s nice about this grouping, is from the first page you can feel the excitement. All of these creators are on their way up, having steadily displayed increased aptitude within the medium that has won them growing audiences. This comes through in the work, giving it added ambition and vitality that might not be found from greener creators, and certainly would not be found in the work of a creator who perhaps feels like they’ve plateaued. The entire team here is out to tell a good story, and seemingly fueled by both the collaboration and the future that continues to align in front of them.

Aside from that pervasive charge of possibility, I also quite liked the concept of Undone by Blood #1, which is a metafictional revenge story set in a rough and sparsely-populated corner of Arizona. There are essentially two answers I might give to anyone asking me what this comic is about. The first and more straight-forward answer is that it’s about an angry young woman in the early 1970s seeking to avenge her murdered family. The second higher-level answer is that this comic is about the ways that the stories we read inform our real life choices, intermingling as it does scenes from the book our protagonist is reading with corresponding slices of her quest in her real life. The best answer, however, is obviously that it’s about both of these things.  

Undone By Blood #1 is a comic about the outsized influence that fictional stories have on a young woman who has suffered the vast tragedy of a murdered family, and she is now reading a tale of Old West gunslingers as she seeks her revenge. There’s a bit of Tarantino, a bit of Cormac McCarthy, and a bit of Charlie Kaufman in this comic, and it all adds up to a very compelling first issue.

Overall: There’s a bit of Tarantino, a bit of Cormac McCarthy, and a bit of Charlie Kaufman in this debut comic from a group of rising creators, and it all adds up to a very compelling first issue. 9.6/10

Undone by Blood #1
Writer: Lonnie Nadler & Zac Thompson
Artist: Sami Kivela
Colorist: Jason Wordie
Letterer: Hassan Otsmane-ElhaouPublisher: AfterShock Comics
Price: $4.99
Release Date: February 12, 2020

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.