Daphne Byrne #2 Review

SUCH WONDERS

Writer: Laura Marks
Art: Kelley Jones
Colors: Michele Madsen
Letters: Rob Leigh
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: February 5th, 2020

Daphne Byrne is a girl in 1886 New York who has lost her father (how we don't know yet) and whose mother is regularly visiting a medium to talk to him. Daphne doesn't believe the medium but the night that her mother took her with her she had a strange dream. Being lead by a boy who looks like he's into the whole goth scene and says that he will bring her to her father, she ends up in a room with a piglet tied down on a table and she's forced to murder it with a knife. So she does. On the last page, she wakes up and has blood on her hands.

She gets up and goes to the dresser to wash her hands but sees a ghoulish figure behind her through the reflection in the mirror, so she drops the vase and the sound attracts Nonie into her room. The blood, which it wasn't too hard to suspect, was Daphne's first period. Nonie kinda blows it off and so does her mother. Nonie shows her how to use a sanitary belt and it's probably the scariest thing in this issue because holy crap that does not look comfortable.

Thinking that she must have been remembering a story in her dream, she goes to the house's library and picks up a fairy tale book. And that's when the boy appears and asks her if she liked the dream. Daphne tries to run away but he keeps following her, through the park and all the way to the library in town. "I didn't mean to scare you." he tells her, and she responds "You're not real, and you never were."

In the library she picks up a book, sits down and starts reading. And the boy appears again and starts talking to her. Asking her why she's reading a silly book and saying that he thinks she needs a friend. When she asks him what he was doing in her dream he asks the same question. "What were you doing in MY dream?" So basically we have two kids from two different worlds/dimensions/or "other sides" sharing a dream. But now he's in her world somehow and stalking her.

At one point he tells her "Look around you. It's all just raw matter. Flesh that doesn't know it's dead. You and I can bend it to our will..." and he makes everybody look like rotting corpses to her. When Daphne's bullies see her talking to herself because they can't see the boy, they start picking on her. So Daphne tells the head bully to come in closer so she can tell her a secret, and then she makes herself look like a rotting corpse with spiders on her face and scares the crap out of her. Later that night in her bedroom, the boy is still with her. he tells him that she doesn't want any more dreams tonight, and they lay down and spoon on the bed. Then we see him as... I don't even know what. Almost like he's cocooned behind her.

Within all this, there is a scene with Daphne's mother at the medium, and the medium is telling her that Frederick (her deceased husband) is saying that she must marry again. And we see a man peaking in on the conversation through a hole in the wall. When she leaves the mediums house she's immediately met by a man named Oliver Fleming, who has to be the guy behind the wall. We've got a setup to marry into money here.

Bits and Pieces

I did not like the first issue and I did not like this one, but just like the first issue, there were a few things that I did like. Still, the story just doesn't really grab my interest and I hope it gets better from here. For the art, at points, it's really good and at other points not so much.

5.5/10