Tower, Vol 1 by Camrus Johnson & Kelsey Barnhart

with art by ChrisCross and Loyiso Mkize, and colors by Andrew Dalhouse.

Imagine waking up in the middle of a video game, and not a fun one with multiple save points and animal friends either. Okay, so there are animal companions to be found in the titular Tower where the game takes place, but our contestants don’t find that out for a while (and these companions really aren’t the cute and cuddly kind.) In the meantime, the players all have to figure out how to survive and win whatever this competition is, even as many of them hope that this really is just a video game, and that when they kill another contestant it’s not actually for real.

That’s what happens to Casandra, Kimi and Mac, the three main viewpoint characters of this comic book series. Casandra is so disoriented at waking up under such strange circumstances that she isn’t even able to grab a weapon before running from her starting zone to find answers. She attempts to make allies by defusing fights, eventually recruiting a small team to travel together through the computer-generated maze of the tower that they’re trapped in. But as they each slowly begin to remember how they got here, distrust and the desire to win unravel whatever fragile bonds they’ve built, even as killers in the guise of computer errors stalk the hallways, destroying contestants for their own mysterious purposes.

Interspersed with the game’s battle royale scenes are flashbacks to who the players are outside of Tower, and what landed them here to begin with. There’s also a shadowy programming collective doing some seriously shady stuff, and we get a wonderful foreshadowing of what comes next with the terrific ending. I’m really looking forward to reading the second trade collection of issues because the groundwork was laid out for it really well in this volume, giving readers a satisfying conclusion to the story arc while getting us ready for comes next.

Where this series really stands out from the usual “literally sucked into a video game” narrative is in the way the characters’ motivations and back stories are organically built up, both in their interior thoughts and through the smart use of flashbacks. Some of the dialog could use a little work, and I occasionally had to put way too much thought into interpreting who was doing what in certain of the action panels, but overall, I was both sympathetic to and invested in our main characters. I really appreciated the narrative choices that were made, as well as the diverse representation, and do want to commend the tag team of artists for doing a decent job keeping the continuity going (even if Cain’s face changed so drastically in the later issues that I wasn’t actually sure it was him until he was addressed as such.)

I actually picked this up because it’s been nominated for a Ringo Award to be awarded at Baltimore Comic-con next month. I have very fond memories of attending the con previously, and while I won’t have time for it this year, I do hope that the awards ceremony gets more people to discover this intriguing and intelligent series.

Tower, Vol 1 by Camrus Johnson, Kelsey Barnhart, ChrisCross, Loyiso Mkize & Andrew Dalhouse was published October 17 2023 by A Wave Blue World and is available from all good booksellers, including