Image’s horror Imprint, Ninth Circle, continues to impress with its newest one-shot, Blood Train. Part Train to Busan and part John Carpenter’s the Thing, the comic tells the story of five friends stuck on a train in what will be the most terrifying ride of their lives, if they survive it.
Kara and her friends – Diego, Stevie, and Amy – take a backpacking trip through Asia which will culminate with an intervention for Kara’s brother Ryan. When one of the friends is injected with a syringe by a stranger at the Beijing Train station, it transforms the friend into a monstrous killing machine – leaving the remaining friends and passengers to fight for their lives and setting the stage for a tense and claustrophobic thriller.
There are big stories to tell in unfamiliar, cramped spaces, and Adam Glass does so masterfully with Blood Train. If the description of a sentient biological weapon stalking the cars of a train isn’t enough nightmare fuel for you, maybe Bernard Chang’s rendering of it will be. Pulling double duty as artist and colorist, Chang brings terror paired with Dave Sharpe’s impactful lettering that makes this a strikingly loud and intense book.
If I have one criticism, it’s that very little information is revealed until something big happens. It almost feels like you learn about things on a need-to-know basis; this can be both intriguing and frustrating. Maybe it was to cut down exposition or because of the lower page count, but it feels like we don’t even learn a character’s name unless something bad is going to happen to them in the next few upcoming panels.
Despite that one issue, I like this story and I like these one-offs that Image has been releasing. Blood Train is a fantastic addition to the slate of titles. The lower page count makes these stories easily digestible and self-contained, but leaves just the right amount of cliffhanger, if needed. Fifty-two pages seems to be the sweet spot for these horror one-shots.
Creative Team: Adam Glass (writer), Bernard Chang (artist and colorist), Dave Sharpe (letterer)
Publisher: Image Comics
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