Tabatha #1
Created and Written by Neil Gibson
Pencils and Inks by Casper Wijngaard
Color by Casper Wijngaard and Anja Poland
Letters by Comicraft’s Jimmy Betancourt
TPub
Digital Release Date: November 28, 2012
Cover Price: $0.99

Never judge a book by its cover. We’ve all heard that, right? Well, toss that in the rubbish bin. The cover is what drew me to this comic and I went in hoping for something dark and twisted. Guess what? I got my wish. Tabatha #1 delivered in spades.

Imagine a sunny day in Los Angeles, birds are chirping and kids are playing. It’s just another day in the life of Luke, the friendly mailman out on his route. After getting harassed by his boss, he got right to work delivering packages and envelopes to the public. Getting attacked by a little old lady, being subjected to a very naked and very large man, getting to flirt with a sexy, tattooed beauty…these are just regular occurrences with our happy-go-lucky postal employee.

But beneath it all lies another agenda. You see, Luke isn’t the happy little camper we might think. After work, he goes home with a list. A list of who didn’t answer their door. Because it turns out that Luke is the scout for a team of burglars. And this story only gets stranger from that point. The group stumbles upon a house that’s loaded with odd and eccentric pieces…but all is not well as they find out quite quickly. After discovering a morbid secret therein, our would be robbers exit the place, post-haste. Realizing his compatriots have no intention of reporting the findings to the authorities, Luke returns to the scene of the crime to dig a little deeper. Things obviously go awry from there but I certainly won’t spoil the ending of this first issue. You’ll just have to trust me that it’s a good one.

Writer/creator Neil Gibson has a wonderfully dark mind. The story seems to go one way while at the same time you can feel the twist is coming. It’s as if he is able to embed a horror movie soundtrack to let you know when bad things are about to happen. Additionally, I dig the fact that he is the founder of T Publishing (aka TPub) and I’m betting he turns out a lot more great stuff in the future. I also hope that future has Casper Wijngaard in it. The artwork on this book is spot on! Clean, crisp and brilliantly laid out…it really eases your mind when he uses the bright colors to emphasize how beautiful and sunny L.A. can be. Contrastingly, he uses the proper subdued palette when necessary for the darker parts of the plot. I think of him (and his work) on this series as a sort of “foreground artist.” Not a whole lot of work is done to the background, with the exception of large panels, leaving the reader to focus solely on the actions and words of the characters in the comic. It definitely helps to spotlight the story without losing our appreciation for the artistic skills that are represented in the series.

If you like horror or noir comics, you are totally going to want this one (it’s part one of a four issue mini-series). There’s no one element that makes it work, rather it’s the combination of our expectations and the crazy (yet believable) world in which the characters live. This is no kiddie comic and it’s not a very wholesome book, but it’s definitely made for the rest of us twisted folks. Plus it’s only a buck! How could you possibly go wrong? Head over to Comixology and grab this bad boy while it’s still this cheap!