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nigellicus 's review for:

No Mercy, Volume 1 by Alex de Campi
5.0

Probably one of the sharpest, most savage and on-the-nose comics out there at the moment, also the most firmly grounded - its horrors feel real and mundane, from a bus plunging off a mountain road to a pack of coyotes attracted by the smell of dead bodies to someone taking a drink downriver from a pair of rotting buffalo carcasses, and all the more unmanageable and difficult to overcome because of that. A mixed group of US students on a trip to remote village in South America to build homes and a school as part of an pre-freshman programme for Princeton. They're varying degrees of rich and pampered, but when their bus crashes far from help they have to become survivors. Nearly every decision, smart or stupid, makes things worse, and the presence of a large quantity of drugs on the bus and rumours of political unrest and bandidos in the hills suggests that many of their perils won't be just of the order of hungry animals and steep cliffs.

It's a brilliantly brutal thriller, initially cartoony and colourful, later dark and sinister and desperate. The bus crash is only going to be the start of their troubles. Congratulations De Campi and McNeil. You've brought genuinely sickening tensions and suspense to comics in a way I haven't seen before.