Wraith: Issue #1

The other day I went to the comic store to pick up the latest issue of The X-Files comic, but alas, its release was delayed a week. Wanting to support the local store anyway, I perused the shelves looking for something of interest and spied the first issue of Wraith. I had read that comic aficionados were excited about this and I have to admit that I was intrigued by the cover, which hearkened back to the horror comics I read as a kid. I also found the license plate to be quite punny (NOS4A2 = Nosferatu). I asked the store owner what he knew about it. He told me he had not read it yet but planned to, since the writer was one of his favorites (Joe Hill also wrote Locke & Key). I decided to give it a shot.

I found this comic interesting and I think it has potential. The comic is based on the metaphor of the road, which represents psychological pathways. Be warned—it is a very dark road that is taken and this is definitely a comic for mature readers. The protagonist, Charlie Manx, recounts the grim story of his childhood to a frightened young girl who is his passenger on the road. He recounts how his pain, suffering, anger, and disillusion led him to seek escape from reality by speeding down roads, which symbolize the pathways to the darker regions of his psyche.

For a time, I went to sleep inside and learned to dream through my days. Not that it made me one lick happier. Every dream I dreamed—all those other places I’d never see, other women I’d never hold, other lives I wouldn’t live, other roads I’d never drive—was another bitter sip of poison.

Manx discovers that he has the power to transform his dark dreams into reality. It is almost like creative visualization with a macabre twist.

If you can dream a thing, then it has a kind of reality in your thoughts. And if you dream hard enough, and you have the right vehicle—a vehicle you really love, a part of yourself—you can slip right out of reality and into that other, better, imaginary world, where the only reality is the one you allow.

The Wraith is Manx’s vehicle for escape—a black, gothic, antique Rolls Royce which carries him along the highways that meander through the darker realms of his consciousness.

Although Manx is a sinister character, you cannot help but feel some empathy. He was abused, he suffered, and he reached his mental breaking point where he had no place to turn but into his own mind for escape. Under the right circumstances, any one of us could snap psychologically and barrel down the road in an attempt to escape. But the sad reality is escape is really just another illusion. There is no place in our minds, no matter how deep or dark, where we can completely escape from ourselves.