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| Review by Lily Fierro |
Story by Joe Keatinge
Art by Leila Del Duca
Colors by Owen Gieni
Cover by Leila Del Duca
Publisher Image Comics
Cover Price: $9.99
Release date: 11/12 Direct Market; 1/25 Book Stores
ISBN 978-1-63215-145-2
Diamond Comic Order Code SEP140652
Kate Kristopher comes from a lineage of pioneering explorers.
As a child, she fought dragons, escaped from danger, traveled to the moon, and began to set the foundations for a career and life in the family business.
Kid Kate seemed to be on the right track for the exploration business, but adult Kate, now in her late twenties, has left that chapter of her life far behind.
Unfortunately, as much as she has attempted to isolate her past, she has not escaped it, with memories of training and adventures with her beloved father flooding her mind throughout her days, especially on the day of her 27th birthday, the starting point for the adventures of adult Kate Kristopher captured in Shutter Volume One: Wanderlost.
Life as she knows it unravels on the momentous day of her birthday, when magenta ghost-like ninjas and a robot (who is peculiarly almost the spitting image of the Monopoly Man) capture Kate as she visits her father’s grave. Claiming to protect her from her siblings, whom she has no idea of because she thought she was her father’s only child, the robot and his crew proceed in crystallizing Kate until a set of bounty hunting lions decide to interrupt the robot’s plan.
When Kate escapes, everything begins to spiral out of control, and all of the danger and violence in her past make a unwelcomed return to her existence.
After a near fatal attack on Kate’s apartment, she embarks on a voyage to gather more information on her mysterious siblings, her attackers and their boss, and her father, who is believed to have passed ten years before, and in this process, she unpreparedly opens the proverbial Pandora’s Box of her family’s secrets. On this quest for truth, Kate returns to her family home and old figures of her past re-emerge, particularly her old nanny, General, and her childhood butler, Harrington, who convey new facts and details about her family’s past and break almost all sense of her understanding of her identity and her expected course in life.
In some ways Shutter could be easily classified as a fantasy adventure. The setting in the mythical future is wonderfully imaginative and fascinating, with animals highly evolved and fully integrated into society with humans and robots acting with some sense of full consciousness and free will. The beautiful artwork further completes the magnificence of this futuristic Earth, and yet, it works closely with the narrative to make Kate Kristopher’s world and problems not altogether too far from our own.
Kate Kristopher’s friends and enemies are all amazingly innovative and fascinating characters with histories and personalities that are deftly conveyed throughout the series, even if the character only appears for a few pages.
Beyond her assistant and confidant, Alarm Cat (yes, that plastic alarm cat you think of from the 60s but now as a sentient being), the many outlandish creatures and humans she interacts with are all paradoxically far removed from our reality but still very relatable, with voices, personalities, and concerns that remind us of people in our lives.
While Kate’s adventures involves assassins, the appearance of a child brother who may have some adventure history as well, and her seemingly immortal skeleton butler, Harrington, at the core of all of her wild endeavors, she is fundamentally trying to cope with the nullification of almost all of her entire belief of her existence, which is a traumatic experience that anyone can relate to, even if one’s own trauma did not exist at the scale of Kate’s.
Visually stunning and cleverly written with a spectrum of emotions ranging from humor, joy, sadness, and wrath, Shutter is a series that represents the pinnacle of what fantasy and mythology should be. Shutter remains focused on its characters, making all of them, especially our main protagonist Kate, simultaneously fantastic, intriguing, and approachable without ever getting overwhelmed by its astonishing setting, though it is clear that Joe Keatinge and Leila Del Duca admirably and commendably worked hard to build and maintain it.
With Shutter, Keatinge and Del Duca meld an original, imaginary world with a classical narrative of the pursuit of self-discovery and identity, making the series an appealing read for a wide range of people. There’s fantasy for fantasy lovers. There’s even some sci-fi for those who love it. And, there’s of course the family drama reigning at the top of the narrative.
Shutter should be a delightful and emotional ride for any of its readers, and regardless of your entering perspective, you’re going to wonder what is next for Kate and still root for her success.
