Colder: Bad Seed #1

written by Paul Tobin
art by Juan Ferreyra

For all its talk of "insanity," Colder isn't really all that interested in mental illness.  It's interested in the horror imagination, the illogical dark whimsy of nightmares.

Colder: Bad Seed, even more than the first series, teases the erotic potential of its horrific fixations.  Nimble Jack cursed Declan to "grow colder," to fall closer and closer to freezing the more he negotiates the nightmare world.  While Reece teases Declan about his temperature, demanding "four minutes of notice" and "three on the weekends" (Colder: Bad Seed #1: 8) before her lover jumps her, it's also clear she finds the uniqueness of his body arousing.  Her co-worker's infatuation with Declan's shaggy, luscious hair somewhat uncomfortably echoes the series' new villain Swivel's obsession with fingers, Declan's own but also his harvest:  "Oh.  This one is very good.  Look at the soft skin.  The fine tapering" (6).  Sitting at his café, admiring the busy sidewalk, Swivel leers at the pedestrians' fingers, mirrored in Ferreyra's delicate close-ups of them sliding over backpack straps, making rude gestures, grasping a dog leash, typing on a smartphone or tapping a table, and holding an ice cream cone, the subtle sexualization of a somewhat unexpected body part.  It's no coincidence that the phone conversation he overhears is one of jealousy and sexual desire, a young man whose friend's girlfriend "drives [him] crazy" (5).  Sexual infatuation and violent obsessions don't fall far from one another in Colder's world.

And, of course, we meet Swivel.  While he lack's some of Nimble Jack's charisma, he surrenders nothing of his creepiness.  He's a ravenous, finger-faced farmer, a relic of a staid, ragged era.  He looks something like a depression-era Pennsylvania farmer, perhaps a conservative minister of an small, old church.  (He also seems to owe something to Scott Snyder and Scott Tuft's shark-toothed salesman in Severed.)  He makes little sense, though he doesn't really need to, but he seems to know something about Declan's past, and he's come to see it to fruition.