Graphic Novel Review: Severed
Comic books are very similar to film and television with the presentation of words and images. Panels take on angles and framing just like film. It’s why it’s not so unusual to see writers cross over and take shots at the medium. With Severed, industry great Scott Snyder brings along friend and filmmaker Scott Tuft to craft a brilliant tale of terror that is as timeless as its monster.
Snyder is known for a number of books, such as his run on Batman, and greater run in general with DC. Outside of the superhero fair, he’s done a number of books garnering attention, particularly his series American Vampire. His familiarity with horror though is not unnoticed and Severed serves him well in showing why that is.
Severed opens with a grandfather receiving a letter given to his grandson for him. It terrifies him and leads him to tell the reader about how he tells everyone that he’d lost his arm back in the war but that isn’t the truth, and that there are dark truths out there that aren’t meant to be known, giving us the premise for the entire story.
Flashing back to 1916, we meet the younger Jack Garron with his arm still intact at age 12 beautifully playing his violin. He lives with his foster mother but receives a letter from his biological father offering him a room down in Louisiana that he decides to act on.
Immediately.
After he’s tucked into bed. He climbs out the window with his violin and hops a passing train and is on his way.
Elsewhere, we’re introduced to a boy being taken from an orphanage for a trade smith program with General Electric. Small spoiler: Nothing good happens to him.
Jack manages to get in trouble on the train but is rescued by a fellow kid named Sam. The two decide to travel together and help each other out as Sam is street smart and Jack is pretty good at the fiddle.
Of course, traveling the road means that Jack and Sam and the monster are on a collision course that is sure to be terrifying.
The first thing noticeable about this book is the gorgeous artwork by Attila Futaki. Futaki’s art is finely detailed and immersive with a washed-out color and darkness that is just right for the mood of the book.
One nice thing about this book is that it is self contained. There aren’t any further volumes beyond this single one. The downside to that is that it’s hard to put down and I wish there was more. From the first chapter, I knew I was going to want to savor it for as long as I could. There is no fat to the book and it moves quickly.
Jack and Sam are the fresh doe eyed children living in a simpler, and dangerous, world. They become fast friends and partners with the traits that they need to learn from each other: Jack has too much trust in others that Sam has lost from living alone too long and Sam has the street smarts that Jack needs to learn before the harsh world kills him.
On the other side of the story Allan is a monster that defines the horror of the book and makes it compelling. The entire book I questioned what he was, human or something greater. It was not something that ever mattered to the story because he was a human shark that only had one horrifying goal of eating kids. Granted he was a shark that was also a chameleon and moved about society like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley.
Allan is the driving force of the book. He’s a being of the road, never staying anywhere for long or keeping an identity past its use. A figure without a background is a force of nature in any story that it appears, however they need to be detailed enough to be an actual fleshed out character and not a Jason Vorhees caricature. Snyder and Tuft have it perfectly balanced with their monster creating something that is just beyond human but still realistic and grounded to recall the horror that any human is capable of.
The storytelling of Severed is a work of perfect pacing. It could have been easy to indulge in certain gruesome scenes or to rush the story but the work here is just enough of everything. Horror and dread appear in every issue, often with something gruesome enough to satiate the gore lovers, but never to an extreme. By the time I reached the end, I felt complete satisfaction but would still love to see more.
