A Voice in the Dark, Volume 1 by Larime Taylor

Taylor’s style is very obviously influenced by Terry Moore of Strangers in Paradise and he makes no secret of it – not that there’s any reason to – and that comes across in both artistic style and the general tone of the first issue. What’s also revealed there is that Taylor suffers from Arthrogryposis, which means he manages to write and draw the entire book with his mouth, which makes his consistency with differentiating the faces of his characters – and the whole project, really – even more impressive. So it’s kind of like Frasier and Dexter had a baby and it was a comic book about a bi-racial teenager, although Taylor stresses in the afterword that he’s looking to go in different directions, and his killer’s gender is part of that. Also, her uncle is apparently one of the best detectives in the world, and he lives in her new town, so that’s an added wrinkle.

She also imagines driving an x-acto knife through the forehead of a mouthy girl in her Ethics class, but I think we’ve all wanted to do awful things to wrong-headed jerks in classes before. That said, her morality remains questionable, because she also daydreams of strangling Jill, her chipper boss at the radio station for giggling a little too much. To be fair, the girl she killed is someone who nearly drove her friend (and now adopted younger sister) Seven (Hi, Blossom… or should I say ‘Bloom’?) to suicide by outing her as a lesbian to her school and her hardline parents, who then disowned her.

Maybe, she hopes, that letting her killer side out of her head in the privacy of a dark room will help lessen her need to kill again. By all outward appearances, though, she’s just kind of this quiet, sullen A-student type, and her big idea about self-therapy is to host a campus radio show (call letters: K-I-L-L, natch) called “Voices in the Dark,” where people can call-in and anonymously share their darkest problems. She has the typical problems of suddenly living with a trio of close-knit strangers as a freshman, but with the added problem of being 74 days removed from murdering someone – and she has audible conversations with her reflection in the mirror, as well as referring to we, the readers, as her “dear diary” – and she looks at that heinous act like it’s part of an addiction she will need to feed soon. Larime Taylor’s black-and-white Top Cow book focuses on Zoey Aarons, an 18-year-old girl moving from Seattle to California to start her studies at Blair College.

A Voice in the Dark, Volume 1 by Larime Taylor