Astounding Tales — Issue Three — 5-Page Comic
A beautiful, relaxing golden hour on the highway. The kind of warm, natural light that makes you exhale. Two officers in a cruiser, following an aggressively ordinary black sedan. The world is safe, mundane, and beautiful.
Don’t trust a second of it.
The further down the road they drive, the darker the sky gets — gold to amber to dusk to midnight. And as the light dies, the architecture begins to lie. Storefronts repeat with dead, unsettling perfection. Intersections merge impossibly into warehouse loading bays. The environment becomes a liminal dreamscape of unlit neighbourhoods and featureless corridors. The spaces remain clean, maintained, and functional — but geometrically impossible. True horror doesn’t always need to look ugly. Here, the beauty of the world is the trap.
The Constraint
This is a challenge in absolute visual discipline.
Tone Reference
The colour palette does all the work that dialogue is not allowed to do. Golden hour is not just a time of day here — it is a promise the comic makes and then methodically breaks, one panel at a time. The reader should not be able to name the moment the world stopped being real. That moment should already be three pages back when they look for it.
The sedan is never menacing. That is the point. An ordinary car driven by nobody, going somewhere reasonable, at a reasonable speed. The horror is not in the thing being chased. It is in the act of chasing it — and where that act leads when the world decides to cooperate a little too perfectly.
The full script for Pursuit is enclosed. If you need more, send a transmission.
— R.H.
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