Initially released as a five-issue series from 2019 to 2020, Unbound blends cyberpunk and fantasy elements in a neon-infused mystery that wears its influences on its sleeve. Writer Ralph Tedesco and artist Oliver Borges team up with color artists Leonardo Paciarotti and Maxflan Araujo in a bloody hunt for werewolves, vampires, and masked killers through a digital landscape. With solid action and genuinely endearing characters, Unbound is a good time.
Unbound
Oliver Borges (Artists), Ralph Tedesco (Writer), Leonardo Colapietro (Cover Artist), Carlos M. Mangual (Letters), Leonardo Paciarotti and Maxflan Araujo (Colors)
Zenescope
January 12, 2022
The story begins with a steely-eyed bounty hunter named Lukas — a guy so cool people quake at the mere mention of him — tracking down a werewolf mobster named Cain. On the job, he runs into an aspiring monster hunter named Marna. Together they hunt down Cain, in no small part to Marna’s surprising combat skills. But there’s a catch: Marna double-crosses Lukas, killing him and taking his XP. The bounty hunter is the avatar of a college student named Lucas, who awakes from a session in the VR simulation Ether to find he’s lost the rank he spent two years grinding to achieve.
While Lucas is mourning his lost progress, another Ether player named Onyx is attacked by a mysterious masked killer – except Onyx doesn’t wake up, dying both in the game and real life. Onyx’s murder kicks off a hunt for a hulking player known only as X. As players try to get answers from the game’s developers, Lucas tracks down Marna to recover his stolen rank, only to find himself drawn into the hunt for X when players around him start dying. Real-world and in-game tragedies overlap and force Lucas, Marna, and rival players to form an alliance to stop X’s murderous rampage.
Unbound is on its face a very straightforward, uncomplicated action/mystery romp that makes no effort to hide its influences and visual references. However, the decision to revel in those influences is where the comic truly shines. While the real world is delineated by unassuming characters and largely neutral tones, the world of the video game is cool, slick, and bathed in neon light. Artist Borges and color artists Paciarotti and Araujo deliver solid ‘80s and ‘90s sci-fi vibes throughout, mixing and matching visual stylings from the likes of Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall, and Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element. You’ve seen it all before, but it just looks so good together.
The impossible city of Ether is pastel purple and neon pink, entire swathes of urban sprawl suspended from floating islands and connected by flying cars. Inside the city, everything is grimy and heavily textured, the streets stalked by vampires and werewolves with beastly anatomy that give their designs a hard edge. The bars, nightclubs, and shopping areas are presented as a kind of Cheesecake Factory of retrofuturism. There are elements of 1920s, ‘50s, and ‘80s architecture all smashed together and given an impressive scale, making the city feel like the open digital playground it’s intended to be. Everything just feels bigger, better, and more polished inside the game, lending to its draw to the player characters.
X himself, the killer lurking in the margins of Ether, is representative of this remix-happy style. He’s visually imposing, standing a full head taller than the rest of the cast with a costume layering a combination of colors and textures. Rather than using the typical black, X’s outfit is made of blue and brown tones. It’s pulled together with elements of leather and metal, the overcoat adorned in metallic-looking spikes, hooks, and tendril-like appendages. The scarecrow-like burlap mask features ghostly red eyes and an angler fish mouth full of overlapping fangs, giving X a distinctly aquatic look that feels at once familiar among Ether’s monstrous non-player characters but also eerie and out of place.
Borges’ pencils really excel during action sequences. He gives each character a real sense of weight and precision in their motions. Plunging knives or swinging fists connect with their targets in a way that is so satisfying to see as the fight unfolds panel by panel. The violence is brutal but never feels excessive, with gory kills or amputations restrained for effect so that they never become monotonous. Borges also adds an element of dynamism during fights by curving the lines of the panels themselves to try to match the characters’ lunges and strikes. This is a very simple yet thoughtful way of conveying action is used to creative effect in an underwater fight in the latter half of the series, making the panels feel as though they’ve ballooned with water.
Tedesco’s script offers a good mix of sci-fi and horror that isn’t afraid to get its hands dirty. It’s also quite charming, given the subject matter. The first issue of the collection begins with the kind of mean-spirited tone that’s prevalent across much of Zenescope’s catalog, where conversations drip with unearned disdain for the sake of easy quips or insults. However, that pretense quickly melts as the reader is pulled into Lucas’ world as an insecure college student living with his mother and working at a coffee shop. He’s a sweet young guy who feels anxious about his weight, misses his late father, and plays the game to gain a sense of confidence. Marna isn’t the sly killer she pretends to be, either, quickly befriending Lucas as the pair develop a gentle yet mutual attraction.
The other players they meet, siblings Jordan and Craig and their friend Erica, turn out to be quite friendly despite their hardened avatars. Their characterizations aren’t deep or particularly nuanced, but they help keep the story grounded. Each character is drawn to Ether as an escape from their lives outside of the immediate plot. The avatars they create are idealized versions of themselves, but not cartoonishly so, expressing what aesthetics each character seems to genuinely think are cool in how they present themselves.
Similarly, Tedesco doesn’t waste time agonizing over the characters’ reasons for playing or how they present themselves in the game. The script doesn’t condemn the characters or attempt to overanalyze their relationships with their avatars when it could have easily slid into well-trodden cynicism about video games and self-expression. It was pretty refreshing to see the players portrayed as normal, everyday people just looking for some fun with their friends, rather than social outcasts or weirdos living out bizarre power fantasies.
It would have been interesting to see the characters’ real bodies incorporated into their avatars, such as Lucas choosing to be fat or Craig choosing to use his wheelchair in-game. While it feels like a missed opportunity to play around with ideas of self-perception and marginalization in digital spaces, I can’t come down too harshly on the comic for not engaging in themes it never intended to.
As much as I enjoyed the ride, once the noir-infused mystery plot unwinds into a series of action sequences in the final act, Unbound’s charm starts to wear off. The best part of the story is the developing relationships between the characters as they try to find Onyx’s killer. Just as the mystery plot is the most engaging narratively, the world of the city is the most engaging visually. Moving outside the city and into the woodlands as the players level up their avatars to take on X, the story loses the atmosphere that made the earlier acts so successful. It isn’t bad; it’s just what happens when the very rigid, artificial nature of the video game framing device overtakes the mood of the story. But the care paid to the set-up makes the reveal of X’s identity and the following conclusion feel satisfying even if the last act is the weakest.
Despite a few soft spots, Unbound is a treat. It’s a breezy read with a strong visual narrative and a love of ‘80s/’90s sci-fi movies that drips from the page. X’s striking appearance is what initially drew me in, but I’m glad I gave this one a read because it’s just fun from cover to cover.
