Shortcut
A piece of advice for anybody out there who might still do this: never read the back of a book before you read the book itself. I flipped this comic over when I finished it and it mentioned something that happened on the final couple of pages, something that I hadn’t seen coming. So if you get nothing else from this review: break yourself of that habit! This is the story of a young couple whose car breaks down out in the middle of nowhere, while they’re taking a shortcut. They’re reasonably outdoorsy people, so they set out to find their way back to civilization and come across an old diary. A very old diary (turns out it’s from 1839), and it tells the tale of a group of settlers and the difficulties they encountered along the way. Eventually their troubles start to mirror the troubles of our heroes, and this is about the point where I have to stop talking about the specifics to avoid spoilers. It was a tense story, but I could have used a bit more time with the modern component of the story. One half of the couple really got played up as the one who complained about every little thing, to the point where I couldn’t tell if she had survival skills of her own or if she was just being dragged along for the ride. Maybe it was intentionally left ambiguous because of what came later? Sure, let’s go with that. It’s a solid comic with a creepy ending, what more could you ask for? $7
