Review: The Butcher #1: Demon’s Scent, Selçuk Ören
By Luke Frostick
The first chapter of The Butcher by Selçuk Ören recently came out. It is a bloodthirsty, nasty horror comic filled with ultra violence. It was released by Europe Comics who have been reliably publishing comics by Turkish artists in English and it is gratifying to see them expanding their Turkish range into the world of horror comics.
The story takes place on a rusty cargo ship somewhere in the Aegean Sea where a down-on-his-luck, slightly daydreamy young man has just joined the crew. However, not everything is as it seems on the ship. The vessel is being used by criminals to harvest organs from refugees and then cover up their crimes by making it look like they drowned in the dangerous crossing from Turkey to Greece.
Ok, as set-ups for a pulpy crime/ horror comic go, that is a good one.
Things veer off the rails for the ship’s crew when a black-clad assassin festooned with machetes and elbow swords -yes elbow swords- turns up and unleashes all of the murder on them. So this comic is only 30 pages long but is able to tell a complete story within those pages.
The art style is a bit flat and and has a scratchy line style. All the faces look warped, their proportions wrong, lines marring the characters faces. It is initially a bit off-putting, but that is the point.
When a wave of horror and ultra violence is unleashed by the assassin, the artist goes all out. Heads and limbs are severed, blood fountains and bodies are hideously mutilated. This works quite well except that the panels seem quite static, where really a greater sense of motion would help the fights feel more crunchy and visceral.
Now all of this might sound a bit juvenile, and well, it is. Though the hook of refugees on a ship is a good one and our point of view character is quite interesting, the assassin is edge personified. The comic feels like somebody dropped a 1990s WildStorm character in the middle of a Hakan Günday novel. The assassin’s dialog doesn’t help that. It borders on the cheesy in places, one of the characters says to the black-clad assassin, “I don’t want to go to hell, to which he responds,” “You’re already there, kid… I’m the one who stokes the fire.” Moreover, it does black speech bubbles with white text thing that was amazing when used in Sandman. Though it has been used effectively in many other comics, here feels like a lazy way of showing that this character is a badass.
This is the first episode of the book so it is very hard to judge exactly where this is going and what sort of quality it will be when everything is said and done. Perhaps the character of the assassin is going in a direction that subverts their initial appearance. I really hope so. Though I have some pretty harsh critiques above, I did like the art and am curious about where this is going from a plot perspective. I’ll read the next few additions of this comic for sure.
*