It’s a rite of passage we all must face: the invite to a high school reunion. For one group of friends, it invites the typical reactions: anger, bitterness, resentment, and terror at the thought of seeing all those people again. But for another guy, one who didn’t get an invitation, the reaction is quite different… and a smidge supernatural. Now he’s on a collision course with those he grew up with, and the results aren’t going to be pretty. They will, however, be gruesome.

High school as a metaphor for horror has been tapped for a number of great stories and series (BUFFY, most notably), but the fear of returning to those years still has plenty of life left in it to exploit, and that’s where GUTWRENCHER sets its course. And my to my surprise, it does a really good job of it.

Frankly, going into any horror title, I tend to expect very little, especially on the character end of things. Most “scary” comics are too preoccupied with getting to the gore to actually create and develop interesting characters you can give a shit about. But Denton does exactly that; in fact, the early murders are the least interesting thing about this book. What really draws you in are the people on the pages. I liked them; I felt for them. And since my twenty-year reunion looms this summer, I also empathized with them.

The SHADOWLINE imprint at Image has kind of struggled to find a good companion to its best book on the stands, BOMB QUEEN, but with GUTWRECNHER, I think they’ve finally found a worthy entry. It’s a keeper.

Marc Mason