Nocterra 1 - Notte Fonda, review: black hole sun

Nocterra 1 - Notte Fonda, review: black hole sun

Nocterra 1 - Notte Fonda, review

saldaPress adds Nocterra 1 - Notte Fonda by Scott Snyder and Tony S. Daniel to its already rich and varied catalog. This is the first volume of one of the first creator owned series launched by Scott Snyder after the end of his exclusive contract with DC, the series in the United States is published by Image under the fledgling label of the same writer Best Jacket Press. Nocterra is a classic regular series of 22-page monthly issues which, thematically, combines Snyder's love for horror with a post-apocalyptic setting and a certain urgency typical of the best 90s production also dictated by sinuous pencils and Daniel's details.



Nocterra 1 - Fonda Night

Nocterra 1 - Fonda Night, black hole sun

Val Riggs is a ferryman. She drives her truck far and wide transporting goods and people in a world shrouded in Great Darkness. In fact, a little more than ten years earlier, the Sun darkened and enveloped the Earth in impenetrable darkness. The phenomenon, which has never had an explanation, obviously has radically changed the world ecosystem and caused social conventions to implode, forcing humanity to reorganize itself in a post-apocalyptic scenario. In fact, darkness is more dangerous than it seems and above all it is contagious: it not only changes plants and animals but also human beings who become hungry creatures and apparently connected with a hive-mind that guides them, but for what purpose?| ); }
Augustus is a scientist who claims, among other things, to have been the cause, together with his brother Tiberius, of the darkening of the Sun. Increasingly suspicious of his two passengers, Val and Em set out not knowing that the deadly Blacktop Bill is on their trail. Once they arrive in the mysterious refuge they will be welcomed but only to discover that Tiberius is at the center of a conspiracy linked to the Great Darkness and the discovery of unknown dimensional planes.

Nocterra 1 - Notte Fonda, fast times ... .

Nocterra is the daughter of distinctly personal suggestions for Scott Snyder who at the launch of the series had not failed to talk in depth about the birth of the series, indicating among the main sources of inspiration the atavistic fear of the dark that also gripped him as a child. A simple concept that found fertile ground in the author's predilection for horror atmospheres which, however, in Nocterra 1 - Notte Fonda are declined in equal measure towards markedly action territories.

Snyder creates a simple but effective narrative tension. He narrates in analysts not only the background of Val and Em but also the advent of the Great Dark, preferring certain stylistic features typical of horror and then turning in the present to styles instead of survival horror in which cosmic-Lovecraftian echoes resurface in the final. The formula is intriguing and is well supported by a decidedly fast pace in which the action is frenetic. The reader is granted very little breathing space while the captions are left with the tasks related to world building, narrating and contextualizing situations and characters.




Nocterra 1 - Notte Fonda Nocterra 1 - Notte Fonda is where it is easy to trace not only the typical characteristics of Scott Snyder's writing but also his over-the-top taste of high-budget action blockbusters.


There is no shortage of double splash-pages but they are exceptions that confirm the rule. The table is divided in a simple and orderly way, no acrobatic, configurational or production solutions are avoided. Instead, you opt for simpler but equally effective solutions: close-up shots and close-ups, long shots shown in horizontal frames, inserts and radical frames where you can graft satellite frames, even whole figures. Even from the point of view of character design, the solutions are simple but effective in which practicality prevails over aesthetics as an end in itself. Perhaps the only flaw in this approach is the design of the Stains, or Human Shadows, or humans infected by darkness whose appearance is indeed threatening but perhaps a little too generic.



Nocterra 1 - Notte Fonda

The volume

saldaPress brings, on the shelves of Italian bookstores and comics shops, Nocterra 1 - Notte Fonda in a hardcover volume that stands out, as is now customary for the Emilian publisher, for the great care in packaging . The cover is in fact worked with embossed and glossy inserts that embellish the Italian edition; it should be noted that this first volume is available with three different covers: Regular, Variant and Exclusive. From a carto-technical point of view, the binding is solid and the trimming of the pages is more than good allowing for easy reading. The paper used is the opaque and medium-weight paper that combines excellent color rendering with the agility of the volume itself, lightening its weight. From an editorial and editorial point of view, on the other hand, there are no contributions from the Italian curators or extras of any kind except the classic gallery of original variant covers. Both the translation and the adaptation are good in the face of an unusual verbiage for this type of story.






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