In between her stops at Marvel (Captain Marvel) & DC (Birds of Prey), Kelly Thompson has somehow found time to write The Cull, a 5-issue sci-fi horror series from Image Comics. Joining Thompson are Mattie De Iulis on art and colors and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou handling lettering. The series kicks off this week with the release of THE CULL #1.

The issue is HEAVY on (really good) character development without any real plot movement beyond some clues here and there. It’s mostly a flashback story that is laying the foundation for the present-day we see for a brief second. Throughout the flashbacks, a character named Lux gets some brilliant character building, one driven completely by the art and the other through a dialogue where we learn she’s dealing with an abusive adult male figure and an alcoholic mother. Other characters are also given complex backstories that help to introduce them all.

However, if you take away two gorgeous full-page panels in this first issue, you’d be hard pressed to come away knowing that this was a sci-fi horror series. You know a group of teens are heading out at night to explore an area near the beach for unknown reasons and stumble upon something out of the ordinary they weren’t expecting. The slow pacing would be fine if this was an ongoing series, but we only have 4 issues left! I will never doubt Thompson’s ability to tell a story after her awesome on Hawkeye, Black Widow, and Captain Marvel. The different with those is that they all had at least 15 issues for her to develop characters, build a world, and flex her writing muscles.

De Iulis’ art is so distinctive and so beautiful. The visuals look like they’re pulled straight from a high-budget animated movie. Simply stunning in every regard. One of my favorite panels was when one of the characters tripped while walking through the tide causing a splash. The detail on the water is so impressive that it looks real.

Getting back to the two panels I mentioned previously. They’re brief and aside from them also being beautifully drawn and colored (I feel like I’m using a lot of different ways to say “good looking” in this review — it must mean something!), but whoa baby do they give you a delicious tease that there’s a really interesting and visually pleasing story waiting to be told. The first panel appears very early in the book as the only scene from the present we see. It that shows you the horror that awaits our characters and reminded me of a scene out of the movie Cloverfield. The other panel occurs at the very end as our characters stumble upon an alternate dimension hidden deep inside a cave they find. We get a wide-screen shot of a bright pink ecological-fantasy world that appears enticing, yet we know what trouble is likely lurking within thanks to the other panel. It’s these two panels that have me dying to know what comes next.

Rating: 7/10