Review – TKO Shorts #008: Roofstompers
Review – TKO Shorts #008: Roofstompers
Writer: Alex Paknadel
Artist: Ian MacEwan
Publisher: TKO Studios
Available: 30th June 2021
BGCP interviewed writer Alex in May 2021, take a few minutes to see what he said about his writing style.
Synopsis
Far away from the pressures of being a surgeon in New York City, Cassie decides to take a solo hunting trip to Wyoming. There she is attacked and luckily rescued by a middle-aged couple living in an isolated cabin with their son. After weeks, she isn’t getting any better and begins to question the couples’ motives and the strange nightly visits that they dismiss as the “Roofstompers”.
This self-contained limited edition short is a printed zine sized at 8.5″ x 5.5″. Buy all of their one-punch knockout shorts today!
Read the BGCP review of the TKO Short #007 here.
Writer: Alex Paknadel
Paknadel’s short story (around 20 pages) sets the scene for a horrific mixing of genres and ideas. Surgeon Cassie takes a break after a stressful surgery during a blackout. In the woods, she hunts Elk but forgets that for everything that hunts, something hunts them. After a bear mauling, she wakes up in a hut with kindly Adlai and Seraphine nursing her back to health. Doctor’s make the worst patients they say and she challenges Adlai’s care, but as he’s used to woods living she in good hands.
Seraphine is worried about her son Benji’s changing eye colour and things just get weirder from there. Over the next few days, Cassis is presented with a list of excuses for not leaving the mountain and with horror she watches the parents leave Benji on the steps as a changing. I’ll leave a few surprises for you to read but’s it’s a mind flip.
Paknadel builds the tension from page one and as the horror of the cabin in the woods unfolds you end up scratching your head and re-reading as he builds tension and then pulls the rug from your feet with a change in direction.
Artist: Ian MacEwan
MacEwan’s art is glorious here, there’s a great overlap panel from page one’s closeup of a surgeon’s monocle then on page three the image is in the same place but replaced with a gun’s sight. Colour tones are used to infer the passage of time and the mind-altering cover gives a hint to the deeper horror within. Overlapping and layered panelling further creates this world and narrative.
Overall Thoughts
Telling a complete and detailed story in just 20 pages is astonishing and Paknadel and MacEwan flex their muscles to show other writers and artists how to do it properly. It has more twists and turns than an out of control rollercoaster and I now want to know more about the world they created.
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