Publisher: Redshift Press
Writer: Chris Sides
Artist(s): Chris Travell, Dean Sandford, Mahmut Dervish, Simon Bennett Hayes, Ashley Hewerdine, Freja Steele, Colin Lorimer
Release Date: 15th November 2014 (Thought Bubble)

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Dark Matter is a collection of short stories, each featuring its own distinctively dark twist, from the mind of writer Chris Sides.  Sides has collaborated with an impressively diverse selection of artists to put this anthology together, and the sheer uniqueness of each strip’s visual style prevents this collection from ever becoming dull or repetitive.  Also, rather than merely being subtle variations on the same theme, the tales here span a variety of genres, from bleak sci-fi to chilling ghost stories and everything in-between.

While there are always the inevitable ‘ups and downs’ inherent in the anthology format, the difference in quality here is rather more pronounced than usual.  Some of the stories hit their mark perfectly, such as ‘Cold Caller’, a beautifully illustrated tale of a desperate salesman willing to sacrifice everything – including his own sanity – to save his career by landing that one elusive sale, while others feel almost rushed, struggling to make their point clearly and losing a significant amount of their impact in the process.

Don’t get me wrong, I know the feeling myself when you have ideas bursting out of your head and you want to get them all down as quickly as possible, but perhaps trimming this anthology down to, say, six stories instead of nine would have given the book a higher overall standard, and made it a far more streamlined reading experience.

That said, the overall quality of Dark Matter is still impressively high, even in spite of the occasional misfire, and several of the stories feature genuinely clever twists that will get under your skin and stay there for a long time to come.   One of the potential drawbacks to effectively knowing there’s a twist coming is that the reader may spend the majority of the story trying to figure out what that twist is going to be rather than simply enjoying the story for what it is.  Human nature, I guess.  However, even with this mindset, some of the stories in Dark Matter are constructed cleverly enough that their resolutions still manage to sneak up on you – a truly impressive accomplishment.

Writer Chris Sides clearly has a lot of ideas swirling around head, and I’d love to see what he’d be capable of in a more expanded format.   His ability to build worlds around his characters is impressive, especially given the limited time each story is given to develop, and while this isn’t quite a unanimous success, there are definitely more than enough positives here to make me think that he’s going to have an extremely successful future in the comicbook industry.  In fact, I fully believe that if this anthology is any indication of the quality they’re capable of, Redshift Press are going to be making some major waves in the small press scene for quite some time.  For the time being however, Dark Matter remains an impressively chilling experience featuring some truly inventive horror yarns.  Well worth a look.

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Dark Matter is currently available for purchase on Comicsy, plus you can stay up to date with all the latest news from Redshift Press by liking them on Facebook and following them on Twitter.

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The writer of this piece was: Craig Neilson (aka Ceej)
Article Archive: Ceej Says
You can follow Ceej on Twitter

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