Silent Nights #1 is a comic written by Dolan with pencils and inks by Omar Zaldivar and colors by Luiz Zavala. Kira must protect a life-changing new program from outside influence. This is a spy thriller comic with mystery elements, a decent bit of drama, and a great deal of violence. The leading lady for this tale is Kira, she is a Russian operative who works for the Council of Nine. The main man here is Bolland, he is a representative of the UN Security Council. This story begins with Kira and Bolland engaging in some adult activities on Christmas Eve. When that concludes they begin to discuss their recent work and while getting dressed Kira stumbles across some shocking information. The violence here is very bloody, brutal, and gruesome with light gore. The pacing is slow for the first few pages but it speeds up substantially afterwards. The tone is like that of a dramatic thriller movie, particularly the climax. The intensity is high almost the entire time due to unease, danger, and especially violence. The dialogue is conversational with a lot of back-and-forth and a couple slightly complicated concepts. There are a couple(or a few) word-heavy pages. This is an exciting debut issue that sets the stakes up high and delivers heavy violence along with strong-willed characters.

            The art here is drawn in a detailed, modern style with a strong focus on the lighting and shading. The color palette here is realistic with a very modest range. Aside from a quick outdoor shot of the United Nations all of this takes place indoors. Many different rooms are visited from privates offices to the UN Security Council. The backgrounds usually show the surroundings but occasionally it’ll be a gradient color or something fitting the action. The expression level here is high as we’ll see a wide variety of looks from these characters. Most of the emotions are aggressive like anger and rage or they are pain-based like desperation and fear. The faces have a varying level of detail from decent to good with the expressions usually coming across strongly and clearly. The violence here can involve firearms and various objects at hand but most of it is physical. This can get very brutal with heavy hits, gruesome attacks, significant bleeding, and light gore. This comic is essentially one long action scene with an overall good flow and high panel count but you may get a bit confused during some sequences.

“Is this worth reading?”

Yes.

“Would I like this?”

If you like espionage thriller stories starring a man and a woman and featuring heavy violence with a bit of high stakes drama then this is for you.

“What would this comic’s film rating be?”

R. Violence, blood, nudity, sexual situations.

“Could I get a quote from the comic?”

“No one put a gun to your head…”

 

Kickstarter Link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tcm-press/silent-nights-1/description

***IN-DEPTH COMIC STATS BELOW***

Probably Contains Spoilers

*
*
*
*
*

Actual Pages(not counting covers and credits): 22

Violent Pages: 13, for 59% of the comic

Sexy Pages: 4, for 18% of the comic

 

**The levels below aren’t necessarily maintained throughout the whole comic, but they were definitely reached**

 

Violence Level – 5

“Wasn’t no tussling at all.”

“Sometimes you gotta hit somebody.”

“I’m getting charged with how many counts of assault?”

“This was a tournament arc.”

“All my life I had to fight.”

 

Gore Level – 3

“The only thing leaking out your face is tears.”

“Looks like somebody spilled some ketchup.”

“Might need to soak that up with a bath towel.”

“That isn’t supposed to be outside the body.”

“This is a slaughterhouse.”

 

Death Level – 2

“And everybody lived happily ever after.”

“We might have gone to a couple funerals.”

“It just LOOKS like a serial killer was here.”

“Yeah this was a tragedy.”

“Think Gettysburg.”

 

Porn Level – 4

“Everybody kept their clothes on.”

“I guess it was too hot for a bra.”

“Sometimes you got to let everything air out.”

“This is like late night Cinemax in the early 2000’s.”

“Oh. This is porn.”