The Plot #2 is out 10/30/2019. — **The Plot #2** is out 10/30/2019.

By Zack Quaintance — If you haven’t read my review of The Plot #1, allow me for a moment to summarize in brief: I thought it was one of the best creator-owned debut issues of the year (in a top-tier that now also includes Undiscovered Country). Basically, that first dropped readers into a full-formed world, which is impressive enough but the creator-owned ecosystem of late has gotten really good at that. What set The Plot #1 aside, was that it also seamlessly doled out the necessary bits of a complex family backstory/dynamic while establishing itself as a character-driven drama about two young, orphaned siblings.

Phew. That’s a lot of narrative heavy-lifting. Oh, and it all looked amazing, serving to further entrench Joshua Hixson as a rising artist to watch, one with a great and versatile talent for ominous imagery. I rehash all of this as a means of saying The Plot #2 felt like a natural extension of the excellent storytelling in the first part.

This chapter opens up by taking a very slight step back within the chronology of the story to give the audience a better picture of relationships between characters, as well as an answer to the question, Wait, where did she come from? Which would have arisen soon after. This sort of time-twisting narrative is common in comics, best used sparingly as it is here. In fact, the minor out-of-sequence bit is more of an introduction that anything, giving us a moment to breath within the suspense of the cliffhanger that ended our last issue. It’s great, and I suspect it will read even better once this one gets into trade.

Really, the highest compliment I can give this comic is that it’s more of the same high-quality storytelling we got in the debut. Joshua Hixson and Jordan Boyd are an artists team to be reckoned with. Just look at the way the page is laid out below. In it, we have a boy who has been pulled from a bog, lying in the foreground as the adults seek to revive him and his sister rushes toward them from a distance. The sequence of close-shot CPR and reaction panels, are intense and almost claustrophobic, leading the eye through them rapidly and upping the tension to bring us with a heightened sense of suspense to the final panel at the bottom of page, his sister’s arrival and her frightened reaction.

It’s a great page-turner to end on, just textbook fantastic sequential storytelling, and it can be found in this comic throughout. There are also plenty of straight scare visuals in this comic placed ominously in the background, evocative almost of Netflix 2018 series, The Haunting of Hill House.

Aside from the tension of the artwork, my other favorite choice in The Plot #2 is that the children’s uncle Chase has a secret, the secret, perhaps to the all the weirdness happening within this story. It’s a secret that we as the audience want to know as well, and, while it will obviously be given to us at some point, playing keep away with it here in the early goings is a great way to drive the plot and hook the readers. It serves a dual purpose of also developing Chase’s character, establishing that he’s a guy who would rather run from the past and the truth than give it any life whatsoever by uttering it aloud. Of course, this is a story and that means our character here is going to be put right up against everything he fears. The Plot is so well-done, that it feels inevitable in that way.

Overall: The highest compliment I can give this comic is that it doles out more of the same high-quality storytelling we got in the debut. This is, quite simply, a comic that continues to get every choice right. 9.8/10

The Plot #2
Writer: Tim Daniel & Michael Moreci
Artist: Joshua Hixson
Colorist: Jordan Boyd
Letterer: Jim Campbell
Publisher: Vault Comics
Price: $3.99

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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.