Advance Review: The Murder, Mourning, And Mayhem Of Cult Classic: Return To Whisper #2

Murder, mourning, and the heist of the century! Discover how our cast of 1997 teenage misfits stole the Diary of Colonel Vance – whose pages tell the secrets of a fabled fortune and a terrible curse! Meanwhile, in the present, another member of the grown-up gang is dead. Will the killer be able to cover their tracks before an old enemy emerges?

Cult Classic: Return To Whisper #2 picks up the dual narrative right where we left off in both timelines last chapter. Nine kids well on their way to finding treasure, seven (seven?) adults mourning one of their friends. The kids have discovered a diary (and by discovered, of course I mean they stole it from the local museum) that supposedly contains clues to finding the local legendary treasure. Meanwhile, in 1997, the grown folk are waffling between grief and greed. I mean, Wyatt is dead, sure, but as long as they’re all here, why not collect all that gold or whatever?

Eliot Rahal has taken the classic tontine murder mystery and thrown in a Goonies/IT/Stand By Me/4 Kids Walk Into a Bank vibe. The kids are totally normal, pubescent pains in the ass. The grown versions are realistic amplifications of their former selves, and their relationships have similarly progressed. The pops come out of nowhere, and the bodies are piling up.

Felipe Cunha faces some interesting challenges in this one. First, kids are hard to draw. Their proportions are completely different than grown folk. On top of that, Cunha has to connect the goofy kids to their grown counterparts, and there are NINE of them. Cunha kills it. They all have distinctive features that make it easy to track which kid belongs to the corresponding adult. The deceptively simple, heavy linework is disarming, catching the reader off guard when the gore pops up.

Cult Classic: Return to Whisper is off to an awesome start, both as a series and as the flagship of an entire new creator owned/shared universe. In an exclusive Comicon.com interview back in January, Eliot Rahal told me this is The Goonies grown up and gone wrong. Accurate. He also owes me a milk chugging video.
Cult Classic: Return To Whisper #2, published by Vault Comics, releases 25 April 2018. Written and created by Elitot Rahal, illustrated by Felipe Cunha, colored by Dee Cuniffe, letters by Taylor Esposito, covers by Irene Koh and Felipe Cunha. RIP G. Raves co-created and designed by John Bivens.