Short Box: You Won’t Feel A Thing #1

Tula Lota Variant

Release: Jan 15, 2025

Cover: Dec 2024

DSTLRY

Creators

Writer	Scott Snyder
Artist	Jock
Cover Artist	Tula Lotay

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If I include the preview when I post this link to Bluesky it will get labeled as having sensitive content due to the exposed skin in the Tula Lotay cover. This will limit its reach – not that anything I post reaches very far anyway – as many people have set their accounts to hide anything with such a label, and many of them will not bother to take a look behind the door that Bluesky puts between the post and the user.

I mention this because looking behind the door factors into the narrative contained in this story from writer Scott Snyder and artist Jock which focuses on a man named John Reader, a retired FBI Agent living in an assisted living facility in a place that’s called Harmless but is anything but.

The doors that are opened – ten of them every morning – are something of a memory exercise for John, who has a tumor growing in his brain. His aide lists a door and gives him a time in his life and asks him what he would see behind the door if he were to open it at that time.

We see that his answers to her aren’t always truthful, particularly when we see the most fateful door-opening in his life when he finds his high school sweetheart – to whom he was planning to propose – brutally murdered.

While he managed to track down many serial killers in his career, there was one who eluded capture, one no one other than John even believes exists: the man who killed his girlfriend 50 years ago who John has dubbed the “Chatter Man” and thinks can be linked to over thirty killings.

As John’s tumor grows and his lapses in memory worsen, matters escalate when the director of the facility is murdered in the same brutal way as the victims of the Chatter Man.

It’s an interesting set up, with characteristically great art from Jock, featuring an unintentionally unreliable narrator who, though he doesn’t realize it, is himself a prime suspect, given that two of the victims of the Chatter Man are known to him, and he is the only person who has ever seen the Chatter Man – once, ten years earlier – or even believes that he exists.

Hopefully, it doesn’t go down that obvious route, or if it does it manages to do so in a way that keeps things interesting.

Regardless, I’m looking forward to picking up the next issue.

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