The horror genre often draws on illness and disease as a thematic vein made (meta)physical through metaphor. See, for example, how Coppola, in his rendition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, draws attention to how the vampire trope is related to our concerns regarding diseases transmitted by blood.

Maybe it is because an illness itself feels alien, so much like an invasion or attack upon our corporal sovereignty, that it is so pregnant with possibilities for those who produce horror. Experts in horror identify the things that unsettle us, and make them not just entertaining — which in turn converts them into strange pleasures — but also legible and thus manageable. In transferring these concerns to uncanny depictions of the world on the page or the screen, we can delve into, with relative safety, the fears we hold outside of them.

An excavation of deep-rooted fears appears to be one of the principal tasks the authors of The Sickness have set themselves. Impeccably scripted, drawn, and lettered by Lonnie Nadler, Jenna Cha, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou respectively, Volume 1 from Uncivilized Books collects issues 1-5 of the ongoing saga and should be top of your Christmas list, not least because it will garner interesting reactions from extended family.

It’s 1945 in Minnesota and a young man named Daniel (sometimes Danny) is suffering from teenage growing pains while also suffering horrific visions in which he sees something akin to a zombie apocalypse. They are clearly in his head, but it is a paradoxically open question as to how real they are. One of the principal things haunting him is a silhouette of a suited man. Meanwhile, in Colorado in 1955, a doctor named George Brooks is engaged in the case of Beatrice Goodson, who killed herself after murdering her family. Some investigation work reveals that she was having visions, one of them being of a man who she thought was stalking her, which leads to George spotting a historical pattern that he begins to believe is leading him to uncover a deadly psychological disease. These two timelines run parallel, but, as the plot evolves, they begin to overlap in ways that begin the process of revealing a larger picture. (The book’s blurb says that the story covers “four decades of American history”. There is a hint of the other two threads in Volume 1.)    

When it comes to the storytelling, “overlapping” is an operative word. The first page gives a sense of how perception overlaps, first on the whites of Danny’s eyes and then onto his face through the reflection on a window, in a way that reveals empirical reality’s ability to seem somewhat mercurial. Timelines also overlap. Dialogue spills between the story arcs in a way that draws the different timelines closer together both in regards to themes and action. Elsewhere, intruding thoughts also inflict themselves onto inappropriate moments. On one particularly striking page, while George is talking to his wife at a diner, imaginatory flashes of the gruesome reports he’s been reading superimpose themselves over her face.

This is also a focus on looking: the double-takes the characters make as they notice the overlapping and strangeness within their world. Often, a gaze will be highlighted in a small frame, laid over the core panels (another instance of overlapping), bringing our attention to the fact that everyone is trying to see something more clearly. Or check that what they see is real.

Nadler utilizes a neat trick in his script whereby the story is anchored around a set of narrative clichés (haunted post-war suburbia, the lone wolf true believer, etc.), which over time are revealed to be a specular reflection of the cliché. They thus act as recognizable entry points to the unsettled diegesis, which, especially by the end of these five chapters, feels like an incredibly well-realized world in which the characters feel like people and the geography tangible.

The Sickness’s effectiveness is buoyed by Cha’s atmospheric, greyscale art. Her pages are dynamic and the action is fluid. Each scene entices you thanks to her deployment of unusual angles, repetitions, and zooms. She leaves space in the panel when the ambience needs to convey a sense of isolation, and fills it up with mise-en-scène when stifling domesticity (and a nascent consumer culture) is what needs to be accented. There are panels in which aspects of the scene totally unimportant to the story, such as pigtails or a feather duster, are drawn with incredible depth. A lesser comic wouldn’t include such flourishes, but this attention to detail adds a textural depth which gives the plot additional impact. (I am reviewing the digital version of the comic, but I am waiting with bated breath to see Cha’s work in both the serial comic books and oversized collected formats.)    

Another thing to note is Cha’s designs, of people with melting skin and eyes of fire, or food crawling with bugs. Again, the physicality here is notable. One almost gets the sense that the comic itself is infested. Credit also to Otsmane-Elhaou, whose expressive lettering helps portray the tone and texture of what those being stalked by The Man hear, without the typography becoming a distraction from the story and disrupting the reading experience.

In the inclusion of the doctor and how Danny is treated, The Sickness is very much about people suffering from something that is somehow contagious and transferable. I won’t draw out the echoes of COVID here, but the book clearly reflects contemporary anxieties. 

Already in Volume 1, the reader is teased with a potential physical explanation for what Danny and his co-sufferers are experiencing, so I imagine that there is some sort of grand vision baked in from the start that the events are being led towards. It certainly feels like a narrative with a purpose. The explanation of strange occurrences is often the weakest part of stories with a supernatural element, but based on this being only Volume 1, I have faith that The Sickness will continue to be a satisfying read in its upcoming installments.

Alongside individual suffering, themes of communal diseases (such as marginalization) and mass horrors are prominent. The monsters here don’t represent the same sort of social critique as do the, say, zombies in Dawn of the Dead, but the individual is clearly at the mercy, haunted, indeed, by some of the tendencies of their societies. The Doctor by the underlying suspicion and derision that his colleagues and neighbors treat him with because he’s Black. Daniel’s Jewishness is weaponized (even by his own mother) whenever people want to hurt him. Meanwhile, Danny and his pals are comfortable denigrating an Indigenous American youth named Virgi with whom they share the town with. News of Hiroshima and imminent world destruction is being pumped into suburban homes thanks to the wireless. Paradise interrupted.

Other times, characters are haunted by the sense of familial foreboding that follows the youngsters whose parents have done wrong, reminiscent of how, in Nightmare on Elm Street, the children are punished for their fathers’ sins. “It’s not a fair thing like that follows me no matter where I go,” says Daniel at a town fair, after being refused to enlist in the army due to his dad being convicted of manslaughter (one of many telling reveals). At the fair, Danny gets into a slanging match with and then fights one of the bullying kids who is competing in a fishing contest against Danny and his friends. While Danny is throwing punches, from Danny’s POV, this kid’s face transforms into raw, liquid tissue, through which he is able to say, albeit garbled: “The past is like water, always flowing.” We are not certain where to or from.

George embarks on an effort to try and methodologically understand how supposedly “crazy” people may be exhibiting traits that suggest a sort of connecting tissue, identifiable characteristics, or diagnosable illness. This is a narrative crux that some readers may recognize from stories with similar plot devices, such as Netflix’s Mindhunter. By the end of Volume 1, it seems like George will become the man to unlock the answers. However, as mentioned earlier, I suspect that later timelines are due to be introduced, and, so, there is already a foreboding that while George may indeed find out about something disastrous, it will be something that he is unable to stop. Is there anything scarier than that?

NOTE: This piece was edited on November 19 following a correction regarding a character provided by the authors.