By Zack Quaintance — I am a fan of the ongoing series of TKO Shorts, one of which — The Walk by writer Michael Moreci, artist Jesús Hervás, and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou — we are here to talk about today. I just really enjoy the one-shot format, 20 - 30 pages in length, with a story that’s entirely self-contained. In my humble opinion, working in this way requires the cutting of all fat, the scaling down of ideas into strong and concentrated narrative moves, and an ending that leaves no doubt that the story has reached its conclusion. I’d like to see more of these industry-wide, with the TKO line serving as a strong model.

Comics like The Walk exemplify all the strengths of this format that I just mentioned above. In this book, we are an unspecified number of years in the future, with climate change having taken an unspecified toll on the earth. The story leaves the exact time and damage ambiguous, which is a great creative choice. It could be five years from now and the surface of the planet engulfed in flames — it’s whatever scenario (all of them horrible) your own mind wants to fill in for our shared threat of looming eco disaster.

All of that is essentially established in the length of a single page, with a mother and daughter walking on a beach — followed by a violent jump cut to desperate claustrophobia of a team looking to find salvation for the world deep under the water. And at the bottom of the ocean is where the real meat of the story is found. We get a cast of characters on a walk (thus the title) as they are assailed by the mystery of a planet that is both failing because of them and expected to bail them out.

The cartooning in this book is phenomenal, with artist Jesús Hervás being new to me. Hervás colors himself in The Walk, and I was perhaps most impressed by how he shaded his linework in a way that made everything feel so closed, so cramped, so constricting. We don’t ever see the monster in this story (another good choice). In fact, we don’t ever really understand exactly what the monster is. Instead, Hervás and Moreci scare us with how threatening the environment has become, with the humans stumbling blindly into out of need and desperation.

It’s all very well done, from knowing what to tell the reader to how to depict it. The last point I want to make here today is that eco-horror can inherently at times feel a little bit preachy. From my perspective, respecting the environment is as one-sided an issue as there is, with no shades of gray. This book has a great heart to it, a sort of different way to look at the issue, which is to say that nature is to be respected, that we may not even fully grasp the impact of our actions, but we know when we’re being irresponsible. And we just keep going anyway. That’s a scary idea, indeed.

Overall: The Walk is yet another excellent addition to the growing TKO Shorts series, the best place in comics to consistently find well-done one-off stories. 8.5/10

REVIEW: The Walk (TKO Shorts)

The Walk
Writer: Michael Moreci
Artist: Jesús Hervás
Letterer: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
Publisher: TKO Studio
Alice and her team of aquatic explorers are eager to study what lies beneath the Atlantic Ocean. Stationed at the Midnight Zone, 2000 meters below the surface; their supplies start to run out. In a dangerous expedition to survive, they must push through but soon realize that the ocean is more vast, dark, and mysterious than they could have ever imagined.
Price: $2.99
More Info: The Walk

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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.