The first cover of Frank at Home on the Farm was enough to grab my attention when this title first appeared on the indie scene and with the final part due for release scene it was about damn time I caught up with Frank & his Farm.
It all opens with our titular Frank returning to his home village after time away fighting a war but the familiar surroundings of his family farm become a sinister new world for him the very second he steps onto it. With his Father, Mother & Brother all seemingly missing the search gets him essentially nowhere with everyone and everything acting strangely and having no memory of the Cross family ever existing. It’s here that writer Jordan Thomas veers off into a nightmarish existence for ppor Frank and with each page turn it becomes more & more uncomfortable to see.
The locals don’t help matters with their lack of empathy for this llad that’s acting weird and rambling on about strangers but it’s inside Frank’s own head that the cracks really start to develop. At least that’s how it starts to appear because as soon as you’ve sensed the weird world around him, it jumps up a series of gears into a seriously disturbing realm that seems to blur reality and a skewed, hell-like world that’s beginning to encroach on Frank’s consciousness.
That warped world is bad enough for our central character to endure but when you couple that with Clark Bint’s visuals it becomes a shared vision of raw madness that has its own tangible feeling of actually being real. The expanse of the surroundings of the countryside bleeds into a certain feeling of solitude for Frank and with a contrast of some claustrophobic scenes of farm life going off the scale & images of war, this all ends up feeling like the worst of both worlds for the protagonist. His colouring then adds and extra layer of bleak reality into the mix. LetterSquids bolsters that sense of crazy with some measured lettering that fits in around what’s playing out in the scenes and only dropping in here & there to make things worse with the detail the dialogue & narration brings.
This series is as unique a reading experience as I’ve ever had with these first three issues becoming a blend of the unnerving, the uneasy but the unbelievably amazing, and that’s thanks to the creative team all pulling their weight & throwing in just the right elements to make you grimace but never look away. That fourth issue can’t come quick enough for all it’s madness & more.
You can get hold of the latest issue & the whole series on the campaign link below:
Frank at Home on the Farm #4 Kickstarter
Head over to Twitter to catch-up with each of the creators too:
10/10
G-Man
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