« If men had wings and bore black feathers, few of them would be clever enough to be crows. » (source)
Today’s titillating offering deals in tropes that horror devotees will readily recognize – a Town with a Dark Secret ensnaring The Plucky Girl in its mysteries and underlying violence. Mysterious disappearances, the proverbial ageing small-town creep whose smile hides uncomfortable truths, oblivious locals… it’s been surely done before, yet the graphic novel Ninecrow by Dora M. Mitchell , initially posted as a biweekly webcomic that ran from 2020 to 2022, succeeds in creating an unnerving story out of these readily available narrative blocks.
Lovingly drawn in mostly black-and-white watercolours, Ninecrow offers the reader plenty of visual enjoyment peppered with hair-raising details faintly glimpsed in shadowy corners. The hand-lettering is also worth a mention, especially given that modern graphic novels often dispense with this element in favour of a computer-generated font. Both art and letters remind me of the tragically departed Patrick Dean, especially some of his work like Underwhelming Lovecraft Monsters.
Aside from its crow population, the town is also abundantly stocked with disquieting old people in various stages of brain fog. Aside from Amanda and a couple of others, everybody seems to be middle-aged going on ‘soon dead’, and not of the pleasant fluffy-grandparent variety, either.
I bought the print version of Ninecrow on Kickstarter because I much prefer reading books in a physical format (you can still buy the deluxe version on the publisher’s Etsy page), but you can still read the full thing story online on the website: https://ninecrowcomic.com/
Enjoy the traipse through the woods!
~ ds
Who's Out There? 