His hands are ghostlike, transparent and translucent, or at least I think they are. They are still able to penetrate a human skull, like Freddy Kruger's glove full of blades, and with a swift movement of his ever deadly hand, he is able to rip open his victims' heads as if he was opening a beer bottle, making it explode into millions of pieces of brain, blood and skull, like a watermelon hitting a hard, sweltering pavement surface on a hot summer day. Who is he? Where does he come from? And why is his nature so menacingly evil in a most vicious, violent manner imaginable?
These, and many other questions, were popping through my head as I read the first Volume of Morning Glories: For a Better Future, a mysteriously enigmatic and complex graphic novel from writer Nick Spencer and artist/illustrator Joe Eisma. What they've created here is a world both secretive in its essence, and dark as all hell: murder is very commonplace, as are unspeakable acts of bloody violence, but that's not exactly what it's about. Just like the cult TV show Lost, Morning Glories at once creates more questions than it can possibly answer, and the result is a comic that is mystifying and eloquent in its elements of enigma and mystique.
At the heart of it are six characters, all troubled (but otherwise ingenious) recruits at the mysterious Morning Glories Academy, a very prestigious and elusive place that is secretly involved in many projects of other-wordly and supernatural nature. In this first Volume, we meet Casey, a very attractive blonde from Chicago, who is devastated by the Academy's brutal murder of her parents, and at first is the only one who displays even a shred of conscience; Zoe, an Indian-American who is as superficial as can be in her desire to lock down attractive but very rich boyfriends; Hunter is a pop-culture referencing machine, an intelligent kid who is all too infatuated with Casey, without her knowledge; Jade is an all too fragile soul, whose depression kick-starts the story in motion, and whose suicidal tendencies are all too alarming at first; Ike is possibly the most deceptive and conniving of the bunch, his manner and attitude always suggesting as if he has an ulterior motive to every action he carries out or every sentence he utters; and finally there is Jun, a Japanese kid about whom we know very little, for his presence in this first part is mostly limited to a few pages here and there. Those, in a nutshell, are our "protagonists".
The "antagonists", if we can even call them that, for their intentions and true natures are still a complete mystery to me, and they consist of Morning Glories Academy faculty staff: Miss Daramount, Miss Hodge, Mr. Gribbs, the Headmaster and Nine, the Academy nurse. These people are either members of some secret cult, and are worshipping some crazy evil or ancient stuff, or are secretly working for some government agency, deep undercover, and uncovering some mysteries that are extremely of the Top Secret kind. That, at least, is my theory after tasting the very beginning of this storyline, which I'm sure will prove to be even more difficult to understand with each following issue.
And yet, so many hours after I've put the first issue down, my thoughts are still hung on that mysterious ghost-like, shirtless man, the one who from afar resembles Iggy Pop on LSD, and behaves even more wildly and unpredictably, with those brain-and-skull-penetrating-hands of his, which at this time, is one of the most nightmarish images I've seen in any graphic novel or comic up to this point. And I've read a LOT of freaky, creepy, mind-bending shit in my life.
B
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