Writer & Artist: Emanuela Milleri / Markosia
1st September 2020
The Pitch: In a corrupt city dominated by two rival gangs there is a growing market for a drug that will change your perceptions of reality. Rita is out for revenge for the death of her husband. Will her sanity survive the experience? Will she complete her mission?
Horizon Cafe is the first book from Italian artist Emanuela Milleri. There is a sense when reading it that she is still finding her feet in the world of comics, but this is not unusual in first-timers. I don't doubt that she is trained and accomplished artist. The central conceit of the book relies on that most acute of melodramatic tropes: the love triangle. It also adds tragedy, in the form of one side of that triangle having been killed when the story begins and the other sides pining, though for lost love. Milleri creates this against a backdrop that resembles the Weimar and silent film (if silent film had been in Technicolor), so in that respect the book is fascinating.
MILLERI’S CHARACTERS WANT TO BE ANGELS BUT GIVE INTO TEMPTATIONS, FUELED BY GRIEF
Milleri's faces are pained, suffering. They carry the weight of the things they've both done and been witness to. They want to be angels, but instead find themselves giving in to temptations fuelled by grief. Our lead, Rita has lost her husband Gerald to gang war. Her ex-lover, a cop named Elliot who once rivalled Gerald for Rita's affections, wants her back. But Rita has other plans, namely murdering Doyle, the gang leader whose war with a rival over a potent drug that alters one's perceptions of reality, put Gerald in his grave. Rita represents an interesting dichotomy in modern comics – she is a woman weakened by her grief and her addictions, but at strong enough to begin plotting Doyle's murder. In a fictional landscape awash with sometimes cliched 'strong female characters' it's great to find one so flawed. Elliot also lacks strength, making him interesting as a romantic foil because he's already lost the girl.
The colours here really help the story. With Rita living in a cold, blue environment surrounded by grey, gravestone-like reminders of the loss she's enduring. Later, the palette gives way to greens and reds, the hardest combination for the eye to accept. Everything here gets lurid, sickly, as Rita has to dive deeper into the underworld to exact her revenge. She has to navigate a world of sickly faces and bad intentions. Milleri gives us full page panels, tableaus that allow you to really see the full figures of the characters as they recoil and huddle inward. The book has a rough, unfinished feel that lends itself to the emotions, cut short. Never complete. The book could be better, more polished. But this is an interesting debut from someone willing to experiment with the look and feel of the story and have that inform the emotion. I'll be looking out for what Milleri does next.
Horizon Cafe is available now from comic stores or digitally from ComiXology.