What I Bought 3/14/2025 - Part 2

Sometimes, I really want to just freak out. I read these stories people share online of terrible customers or terrible customer service, and think, "Man I'd love to tell that jerk off." Which, I suppose, is really just me looking for an excuse to behave like an asshole. Life tends not to present me with such opportunities, which is it (for some reason) shielding me from my own worst impulses.

Anyway, here's the other book from last week.

Dark Pyramid #1, by Paul Tobin (writer), PJ Holden (artist), Sara Colella (color artist), Taylor Esposito (letterer) - Don't worry man, it's just the title logo. It can't hurt you.

A live-streamer named Hooky Hidalgo (that can't be his real name, please tell me it's not) is climbing around Mt. Denali and tumbles onto a ledge, where he finds a strange temple. As he enters the temple, Tobin and Holden switch to two pages of 9-panel grids, mostly showing the people who are watching or listening as they go about their days. Which means they're as in the dark as we are about what happens to him when the feed goes dead.

That "they" includes his girlfriend, Becca, who promptly sets out - with a financial assist from their subscribers - to Alaska to find her boyfriend. What she finds is a ton of Hooky's fans have arrived to find the guy, and taken up all the available rooms in town. Revealed to Becca and us in another 9-panel grid, so props to Tobin and Holden for using those to convey certain info without wasting a bunch of pages.

Still, no room for Becca. But wait! The local cops, who weren't helpful earlier, show up, offering to let her stay in the cabin of a friend of theirs while said friend is away. How nice!

Or not. A woman named Shailene sneaks in that night, warning Becca she's been set up to be killed, and the cops will write it off as a bear attack. You might wonder what's going to kill her that could be written off like that, and well, for a few pages, all we get is darkness and double-ringed voice balloons saying cryptic shit. On the last page, we finally get a good look at what's speaking, and I think the close-ups that only show bits, like it's an amalgam of mis-matched parts, work better. The unearthly green tint Colella uses to break up the shadows once it arrives doesn't seem to be coming from the creature so much as the ground beneath it. A nice touch which adds to the weirdness.