Riding public transportation in New York City can make you feel like you want to murder people sometimes, but Kill Train takes the concept to the next, logical extreme. And if you’re looking for a bloody good time with a healthy dose of satire this Halloween, look no further than the book from Mad Cave Studios, written by Olivia Cuartero-Briggs with art by Martina Niosi.
Set in a New York dealing with a serious population explosion, the government has come up with a solution: the Kill Train, where one subway train out of a thousand is randomly picked for extermination, everyone riding that train killed. Enter Vanessa, a single mom who is not having it all in the big city. Instead, she’s having a mental breakdown trying to balance her job, being a parent, and just living in NYC in general. And when she loses her transportation card in a taxi, she figures why not take the subway? They just had a Kill Train, after all.
You’ll never guess what happens next: yep, she’s on a Kill Train, and along with other survivors has to fight her way through the cars against a series of homicidal maniacs, while having a mental break herself.
Sound farfetched? Speaking as someone who lives in NYC, what’s so smart about the concept is that it really isn’t… Maybe the “killing a whole train of people” thing, but New York is the sort of place where something horrible happens and you’re going to work the next day on the subway, because you just have to. The idea of taking population explosion and distilling it down to murder is exactly the sort of timely, satirical bent we need from fiction right now.
But also: it’s a ton of fun. Each train car’s “boss” not only is expertly drawn by Niosi, but ties into Vanessa’s backstory and deteriorating mental state over the course of the five issues, making it a great character study as well. The whole thing has been collected into one trade paperback, and while it might make you swear off the NYC subway forever, the book is well worth the ride.
It’s spooky season, and you know what that means: time to curl up with a comic book or graphic novel that will scare your socks off. With that in mind, we’re posting a new horror book to check out every day of October, for our 31 Days Of Halloween Comics. Awoooo! Looking for the rest of our picks? Check them out on the Halloween tag.
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