Infidel
Pornsak Pichetshote, writer; Aaron Campbell, artist; José Villarrubia, colorist & editor; Jeff Powell, letterer & designer
Image Comics, 2018
At its heart this is a modern haunted house story. But its protagonist is an American Muslim woman named Aisha, and she and her multi-racial neighbors face racism and racial fear along with the supernatural entities that inhabit their apartment house. It's a special place, and not in a good way: it is the site of a mass murder. The back story of that is a central part of the narrative. It is revealed bit by bit, finally figuring strongly in the climax.
The supernatural entities reveal themselves to the residents one at a time, so it takes a long time for them to agree on the problem (they all think they're seeing things). And in the meantime bad things start happening, like Aisha's daughter and mother-in-law falling down a flight of stairs to their deaths. Caused by a ghost, but it looks like Aisha was responsible. In the end her friend Medina confronts the house, leaving her alone but free. Medina had hoped to render the place uninhabitable--thus leaving the spirits powerless--but the final scenes leave that in question.
This is a very effective horror story. That the political/social justice theme actually manages to contribute to the horror is truly remarkable: didacticism tends to be the death of story telling, in any medium. Pichetshote (mainly known as a Vertigo Comics editor) totally pulls it off here, lending an atmosphere of contemporary reality. Yet there is no sense of it being "pulled from the headlines," just a bit of real horror in the mix along with the supernatural. Campbell and Villarrubia contribute visual art that is generally realistic (doing an especially good job with the design of an unusually diverse group of characters), but employs imaginative surreal images when the ghosts are present. In a touching scene at the end Aisha converses with a cartoon version of Medina based on a childhood drawing of the two friends. An excellent miniseries which I overlooked when it came out, but am delighted to have caught up with it now.
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