Without Fear

I really wish I had written this book.

That’s the highest honour I can bestow upon anything, really. This book is so far in my wheelhouse I wonder if Ferrier didn’t incept it out of me, and the only way I know he didn’t is that he wrote it far better than I ever could 😦

ULTRANOVA is a sci fi horror tale that’s somewhere between Kubrick and SUNSHINE and while feeling influenced it never once feels a slave. It’s lazy to invoke the names above, it’s a high concept sell, when really ULTRANOVA needs to be sold as an experience of cerebral fear where tone and texture play as much a part as narrative and resolution. This book is an experience, and once you finally exhale from after having finished it. True terror is hard to pull off in a comic and here Ferrier scripts it well and then Chris Peterson, with Ed Ryzowski colours, deliver a book where the pages feel haunted and by the end you feel ragged. Id call this book pretty if it weren’t so draining and exhausting. It is pretty but I’d better call the art masterful and effective.

This book will absorb and crush you.

But perhaps the greatest reason yet to hate Ferrier for this book is the fact this isn’t his schtick. He’s the guy who writes TIGER LAWYER and THE BROTHERS JAMES (future IHRF instalments to covers these golden tales) and I feel like I know a Ferrier book when I read it because it’s irreverent and funny while being brutally honest and open. Then ULTRANOVA drops and it makes me realise Ferrier isn’t just beating us all at his game, he’s schooling us at every game.

You should buy ULTRANOVA on ComiXology right now, or perhaps scope the floppy on Challenger Comics.

ULTRANOVA was the best one-shot of 2013, by far, and I hate Ryan Ferrier for that because I released two one-shots in 2013.