The Seasons Have Teeth #1 – Review
The initial few pages of The Seasons Have Teeth introduce us to this world where the change of seasons are to be feared. So feared that it is resulting in a mass evacuation of the town that semi-retired photo-journalist Andrew calls home. As Andrew is on the phone with his friend and editor, he muses over the local townsfolk evacuating as the change of season seems to be on its way through. A change that is sure to bring destruction in its wake.
With the citizens in his town freshly evacuated, Andrew ventures out to take shots of the season taking over with fauna taking over and squeezing the life out of buildings and old roads in a very Triffid-like example of world domination. As he continues to take photos of old building being left in ruin as the fauna destroys what’s left of them he comes across an old gazebo that his now deceased wife and he first made love. He daydreams this event as he’s interrupted by present day kids playing by the gazebo when they should’ve been evacuated. He urges them to flee only to have the gazebo collapse on top of him.
Struggling to crawl out of the rumble, Andrew surfaces to a world that seems forever changed by the season that has turned it forever green. With a startling revelation that a god-like behemoth representing the change of season in the form of a gigantic kaiju-sized beast has arrived and is as inquisitive about Andrew as he is about it.
The designs of this creature, whether by series writer Dan Watters or artist Sebastián Cabrol, is leviathanic. This god-like creature made of sinew-like tree muscles is made complete by a face covered by a giant cow skull. A design which seems to have more in common with paganism than it does the gobbledygook of comic book science.
The Seasons Have Teeth has thematically borrowed from the nature vs science debate as much as it has a variety of intellectual properties we’ve come to admire over the years. The idea that nature itself can be its own monstrous force is heavily explored by Dan Watters and thanks to the combined talents of Sebastián Cabrol and Dan Jackson we’re dropped off right in the middle of a post-apocalyptic evolution.
Shades of films like The Happening and Annihilation can be felt from page to page. But it’s the humanistic tie-in of protagonist Andrew who also acts as the audience surrogate which is insanely brilliant in its own right. There’s Kaiju of a different flavour in The Seasons Have Teeth and it brings about a reckoning on humankind as a whole – shot by painfully photographed shot.
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