South of nowhere seems pleasant enough until two locals crack open a book which in turn cracks open reality. Soon the formerly good and simple folk of Conover County find themselves up to no good, turned into monsters, cursed and controlled by an evil force. Others are endowed with the power to fight it and keep the crack from widening. Plenty of small town humor and energy are counter-balanced against some truly ghastly visuals
It should be noted I have a soft spot for anything Cthulhu-esque. Fling a tentacle or two at me and I swoon with cosmic dread. That said North 40 reads a little fast, coming off as a series of storyboarded scenes rather than as a carefully constructed story with well developed characters. You sense all that is lurking underneath but perhaps the creators should have taken yet another page from Lovecraft and concentrated more on building the atmosphere and introducing everybody and less on depicting the sharply detailed horrors which are admittedly fun.
I think this could develop into a dynamite series and would make a fantastic TV show; this has a strong, while definitely not stale, whiff of Buffy about it, as in potential for a strong group of character arcs. A stronger comparison might be made to the far superior comic series Girls by The Luna Brothers in which a small town is held in isolation via an invisible force field and finds itself at the mercy of a group of naked young beautiful women who try to reproduce with the men and kill all the earth women.
By extension I could wish that North 40 had the same sort ofsubtextual weight but there are hints in issues 1-3 of what is hopefully to come.
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