"Lonely Receiver #4" Comic Review

Catrin is desperate to get back the love she lost at any cost. This need has already got blood on her hands and now she's heading into the black market to find the dark reaches of the web where she might find some semblance of that connection again.

Look, I'm going to level with you here. I thought I had a handle on Lonely Receiver with the previous issue, then this one hit and I have no earthly idea what's going on. This book gets super trippy as Catrin explores a cyber mind space to get her rocks off, falling into a kind of trance. All the while, her thoughts form a poetry of sorts as she falls deeper and deeper into this virtual world full of flesh and pleasure, but it's never enough.

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Although I don't really understand Lonely Receiver #4, it has an unmistakable tone. Writer Zac Thompson and artist Jen Hickman convey a clear message of wanting coupled with Catrin's desperation. It forces you to question what's real. A great example of this is on the first page when Catrin looks down at her hands and they're like wavy shimmers with her fingers stuck together and stretched out.

The part that really freaks me out in Lonely Receiver is the weird shadow entity that seems to be following Catrin around. It loosely resembles a person, but without depth. It's flat. Is it real? Is it in her head? What power does it have? Letterer Simon Bowland gives it a stilted speech pattern in black word balloons, adding to its unnatural quality. Catrin comes face-to-face with this thing in a big way and it's super creepy.

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There's one more chapter in Lonely Receiver and I'm going to see this series through to the end. I may not be picking up everything the creative team is putting down, but you can't deny the unsettling feeling it creates. It's a harsh and frightening examination of our addiction to technology taken to the extremes. It's also super weird and I need some more time to process it all.