Writer: Kelly Thompson
Artist: Mattia de Iulius
Image Comics, April 2024
Beachside caves in fiction are dangerous places harbouring strange inhabitants. Homer warned us about this in The Odyssey, when Odysseus and his crew stupidly thought the smorgasbord in the dark cave was altruistically left for them. Two and a half thousand years of storytelling later, in The Cull, five high school students named Cleo, Wade, Will, Lux, and Kaitie decide to film a motion picture on the beach and wander into a littoral cave, and they encounter much more than they were expecting.
Here is Image Comics’ promotional pitch for this collected volume, published last year (somehow, we missed it):
Eisner-winning writer KELLY THOMPSON (BLACK CLOAK) and superstar artist MATTIA DE IULIS (Captain America) team up for their first creator-owned work together
Something is Killing the Children horror vibes mix with The Goonies-style adventure as five friends set off to shoot a short film on a forbidden rock near their home the summer before they all go their separate ways. But that’s not really why they’re there. One of them has lied. And that lie will change their lives forever.
We have enjoyed American writer Kelly Thompson’s work on Black Cloak, also from Image Comics. We reviewed it favourably last year: see Black Cloak Volume One (review) – World Comic Book Review.* As with Black Cloak, Ms Thompson spares no effort in this title on meticulous characterisation revealed both through dialogue, action, and the in-story insights of the protagonists. She outlines the five leads in her own words on her Substack platform: Meet… The Cull? – by Kelly Thompson – 1979 SEMI-FINALIST. The most pleasant aspect to the characterisation is that the five young people, despite having very different personalities and backgrounds, are all firm friends who back each other to the very end.
The story begins with a slow creep, a prowling about at the tail end of night wherein the characters head to the beach to make a home-made film, evoking The Blair Witch Project rather than The Goonies. The tide is low but will rise, and the cave is dark. At the end of the cave is a wonder: a subliminal pocket universe, filled with sickly and garish luminescent light, too bright in the same way that pink cotton candy is a lure for children. But there is gravity and there is air. They leave little flags homemade by the self-harming Cleo (each featuring a scrawled unhappy face) to mark their way, so they do not get lost. Cleo, as it turns out, knew about the place beyond the cave, and thinks her missing little brother is trapped in it. She is forgiven by her friends for the deceit. As the five began to splash through a shallow sea, we were reminded of Robert Heinlein’s 1980 novel “The Number of the Beast”, where one of the characters, upon being newly appointed as captain of a small vessel of four interdimensional explorers, suddenly freaks out at their lack of preparedness and the degree of risk. Here, there is no freak-out. Instead, there is meek celebration that the seawater is not acid. “Hooray,” says Cleo. “I don’t burn up or melt or anything.” The explorers could be breathing in lethal pathogens and soaking up concentrated neutron radiation for all they know. Teenagers.
The cave is more than just a passage to psychedelic Narnia. The environment reflects what it sees and what it learns from its intruders: a small sea creature in an all-too-creepy way mirrors a face. Ms Thompson’s great strength in Black Cloak is world-building, both in terms of cultures and geography. In The Cull, the exit to the cave takes us to what is described as a “liminal space”, with its own rules and ambitions.
“Liminal” is a critical word, jutting out from the plot like the rocky outcrop on the beach at the beginning of the title. Liminal space is a concept which is well-enough known and sort-of enjoyed (and is the subject of a popular sub-Reddit which we follow). These are creepy in-between places such as long, disorientating hotel corridors. But what of a liminal universe? Liminality, as it evolves, has a rich anthropological history, dating back to a study in 1909 by Arnold van Gennep called Rites of Passage. In 1967, anthropologist Victor Turner wrote, “The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous.”
The five in the liminal universe beyond the cave are threshold people, until transformed into something brighter, something else. (Two of them, Lux and Wade, incidentally lose their virginity along the way, a definitive rite of passage into adulthood.) The liminal universe is not just a corridor between universes (but more on that in a moment). It is also a corridor for people on their way to being something else. Ms Thompson burdens her surreal and unsettling landscape with more than one meaning.
The art is wonderful. Speaking to Variety magazine in 2024, director Denis Villeneuve said that cinematography should not be interrupted by dialogue.
“Frankly, I hate dialogue. Dialogue is for theatre and television. I don’t remember movies because of a good line, I remember movies because of a strong image. I’m not interested in dialogue at all. Pure image and sound, that is the power of cinema, but it is something not obvious when you watch movies today. Movies have been corrupted by television. In a perfect world, I’d make a compelling movie that doesn’t feel like an experiment but does not have a single word in it either. People would leave the cinema and say, ‘Wait, there was no dialogue?’ But they won’t feel the lack.”
The teens chat between themselves, exhibiting signs of nervousness. But there are tracts of The Cull which do not feature any dialogue at all. Here, Mr de Iulius is allowed to spread his creative wings and carry the story. The alien who confronts the five in the liminal universe is very striking, its environment is lurid and beautiful, and the rendition of the people in the story is stunningly photorealistic, but for us it is the hazy beach where Mr de Iulius excels. The before and after landscapes are striking: fun versus ruin captured in a page. Little wonder Mr de Iulius received an Eisner nomination for his work on this title.
With such effort invested in the plot and art, we are sorry to say that toward the conclusion the comic abruptly trends towards the lowbrow. The main action sequence strays into unnecessary superhero territory. Each of the characters develops their own powerset with foundations in their individual personalities. Worse, at the end, the characters fuse together to form a chimera, an organic version of the Power Rangers, to fight a liminal universe kaiju. There are superhero blasts of energy, superhero explosions, and a leftfield superhero strategy suddenly deployed against futile odds. We cannot think why The Cull lurched in this downward direction. Could not Cleo have accepted and assimilated her depression to foul-up the kaiju’s empathic hive mine, demonstrating her self-worth after having been rejected and then hunted when in the liminal dimension?
Abruptly, the story recovers – more than recovers. Like the characters, it metamorphises into something quite brilliant. A gut-wrenching twist comes on the last page. We promise spoilers in our editorial manifesto, and it has been a year since publication, but this one is so clever that we are reluctant to give it away. Following the obligatory superhero victory, the story jinks and shifts to an unexpectedly saccharine return home. All of the characters’ families have survived the kaiju’s incursion. The missing little brother is safe. There are happy hugs and tears. The image of the ravaged beach on the first page seems to be overplayed. The only problem is that the homemade red flags, placed on Cleo’s desk, feature crayoned love hearts instead of sad faces. The liminal universe was a hotel corridor after all, and they have entered the wrong room. Here, the story ends. Exquisite.
*We have also read Ms Thompson’s Jeff the Shark. A favourite of the nine-year old in your reviewer’s home, and a different thing entirely.