By Zack Quaintance — Telling a story wherein the main character is essentially inactive and incapacitated is a tricky thing, but writer Peter Milligan and his collaborators have done just that with Out of Body #1, the first issue of a new series from AfterShock Comics. In this book, our central-most protagonist is a man in a coma, confined to a hospital bed and able to do little but think, which is conveyed to the audience via captions. It’s with this construction that the book sends our hero on a journey to solve his own murder, or, I guess technically, coming murder, since he’s not quite dead, not yet.

Within his narrations, our central character is disoriented, often struggling to recognize the line of people from his life who come to visit him in his incapacitated state. They talk to him, they ask him questions, and, mechanically speaking, they are the ones who drive our plot, giving our passive hero clues upon which to puzzle. It’s an interesting setup, one I’m not sure works in prose, nor even in television or movies. But as Out of Body #1 shows, it does actually work (and fairly well) in comics.

A big part of the reason why is, of course, the artwork, done here by Inaki Miranda with colors by Eve de la Cruz. The entire book looks great, but perhaps what stands out the most is the way the duo is easily able to differentiate flashbacks from present, scenes set in the hero’s mind from scenes set in the reality of his hospital room. It may seem a simple thing, yet if the book isn’t able to so clearly delineate these differences, I doubt it works at all. That would certainly be the trouble in prose, where separating sections like this can be far harder and more disorienting.

The other creative decision that makes this concept work is to incorporate a pair of further afield subject interests outside of the relatively simple seeming murder mystery. The first of which comes right away, before we even meet our protagonist, with the book opening on a demon named Dorian Gray harassing a character who feels like a familiar, before we cut to a medium who has just sensed that our hero is now on the cusp of death. So we get the supernatural genre touches that you almost have to have to make a go of things within the monthly comics direct market.

It is, however, the second additional subject matter I found far and away the most interesting choice in this book: the incorporation of experimenting with psychedelics as therapy. The concept is that patients can benefit from therapy combined with small controlled doses of psilocybin, the active ingredient found in substances like mushrooms or LSD. This is actually rooted in an interesting and emerging field of modern science (one I recently read an entire book about, Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence).

Essentially, for many years the U.S. government in particular has stigmatized psychedelic substances, dating back to the hippies and deeming them a threat against decent society. But psychedelics lack the qualities that make drugs, well, drugs. They aren’t addictive, they don’t damage the body or the brain, and the actual way they effect the mind remains largely mysterious, with any substantive scientific exploration of it largely hampered by that stigmatization. This is changing, as doctors and researches are now able to do those studies. The character in Out of Body #1 is one of those doctors, and it’s a great, fascinating juxtaposition with the other subject matter here, with the man being on the cusp of death and with the idea of a medium who can explore planes of existence outside reality.

Indeed, it’s really this focus that makes a book with an incapacitated protagonist work, freeing him as the title suggests to be out of body, to explore existence in a more fluid way that we in the real world don’t quite understand, which in turn frees the art in this comic to get looser. It all adds up to one of the most fascinating new comics of the year so far.

Overall: Out of Body #1 is one of the most fascinating new comics of the year so far. A really intriguing mystery, this book combines a murder mystery with an interest in new real world research being done around psychedelics, and the results are fantastic. 9.5/10

REVIEW: Out of Body #1

Out of Body #1
Writer: Peter Milligan
Artist: Inaki Miranda
Colorist: Eve de la Cruz
Letterer: Sal Cipriano
Publisher: AfterShock Comics
When Dan Collins wakes to finds his life hanging by a thread, he must use his astral projection to discover who tried to kill him. Who is the beautiful mystic who tries to help him? Why does August Fryne want Dan’s soul – and what does it have to do with a demon who seems to be Dorian Gray? A weird, occult detective thriller about life, death – and whatever lies in be-tween.
From award-winning comic book writer Peter Milligan (X-Force, X-Statix) and artistic sensation Inaki Miranda (WE LIVE, Harley Quinn) comes an awesome new dimension in horror and
mystery!
Price: $4.99
Buy It Here: Out of Body #1

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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.