After the world was destroyed by monsters, Rico and his family survived in the tunnels beneath San Antonio. Then one day he meets Lupe, a girl living on the surface. How did she get there and how has she survived? Find out in Heart Eyes #1 from Vault Comics!
HEART EYES #1
Writer: Dennis Hopeless
Artist: Victor Ibáñez
Colorist: Addison Duke
Letterer: Simon Bowland
Editor: Adrian F. Wassel
Publisher: Vault Comics
Cover Price: $4.99
Release Date: August 17, 2022
Previously in Heart Eyes: In a world where sanity-eating monsters destroyed humanity, small enclaves of survivors live in terror and isolation. And then Rico meets Lupe, the girl of his dreams, who walks out in the daylight and seems be surviving just fine on her own.
WHO IS LUPE?
Heart Eyes #1 wastes no time establishing its setting. A streamer starts his weekly show on the street where some kind of huge sinkhole just opened up. And then the tentacles envelop him. The narration takes a step back to consider all the ways humanity was on track to destroy itself. But in the end, it was monsters. It is as clear and concise as it is dramatic, and I love it.
The scene shifts and we meet Lupe, a young woman walking alone along a devastated and abandoned freeway. She is crying, but she takes off her glasses, wipes her eyes, and a smile breaks out. She comes into the ruins of San Antonio. Along the Riverwalk, she goes into a smashed-up souvenir shop and takes a large octopus stuffy. She always wanted a stuffy, she says. Then a person in a wet suit pops out of the water and pulls her below the surface.
This is Rico. He lives with his family in the tunnels that run under the Riverwalk. From his perspective, he has saved Lupe. There are monsters out on the surface. Underground here, there is a lot of water, and the monsters do not like water. Lupe trusts him but admits that she is naïve. Rico brings her to the family compound where his sister, Nat, threatens to shoot Lupe on sight.
Even at best, Lupe’s arrival is a cause for argument. Who is she? Is she really stupid enough to wander the surface alone? How is she even alive? But Rico trusts her and sees her as a fellow survivor. He wants to be able to make some connection, to find some community with others.
Threaded throughout are flashbacks of moments from earlier, although we do not know how they relate yet. Lupe, as a little girl, lives with an uncle who drinks. Rico sees his grandmother attacked by a small monster. In the night, Rico has nightmares of his mother being taken by a monster. Lupe hushes him before he screams and shares her memory of walking outside when she had nightmares. She remembers the night as being peaceful. Or she says she does, even while her memory is of police beating a Black man.
Lupe talks Rico into going outside with her. She says she has been outside every day since after the monsters destroyed everything. Rico is cautious, but Lupe’s enthusiasm is infectious, and she is a girl who is around his age. He follows her and they explore an abandoned San Antonio at night with no monsters around.
Nat follows them and knocks Lupe out before dragging them both back. This time Rico challenges his family in that there were no monsters out there. Maybe things are not what they think. But Nat insists there are rules, and those rules are there to keep him safe, and that is how they are all alive.
An alarm goes off, and every outside camera shows monsters. And if Lupe is a factor in this, it is not in a way you might expect.
SCRATCHING OUT AN EXISTENCE
The art of Heart Eyes #1 is fantastic. There is an incredible amount of detail, so the scenes are rich with a sense of place. The opening panels are a terrific example of this. They are presented as though we are watching a video on a phone. The streamer is smiling and jovial as he talks, and the “like” reactions bubble up while, in the background, we see the crowd facing away from us, toward the cloud streaming up from the sinkhole. There is a roar, the crowd suddenly turns to run, and the tentacles overwhelm the streamer as the “likes” continue to bubble up. It is shocking.
The characters are wonderfully rendered as well. Lupe looks so normal and thus out of place in this post-apocalyptic world. She is wearing shorts and a tank top, as well as cute sandals. She is clean and, in the color scheme, brighter than her surroundings. She wears a cute octopus clip in her hair. She is curvy enough to look sexy, but also has a child-like air. We want to like her – there is nothing not to like about her. But in the world that we have been presented, she just does not seem to fit in.
BOTTOM LINE: SO MANY QUESTIONS!
Vault has the beginnings of another gripping tale in Heart Eyes #1. It feels like there are undercurrents we cannot dream of, and that makes me eager to find out what happens next.
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Heart Eyes #1
Lupe is the girl of Rico’s dreams, except that her very existence seems improbable.
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By day, she’s a mild-mannered bureaucrat and Ms. Know-It-All. By night, she’s a dance teacher and RPG player (although admittedly not on the same nights). On the weekends, she may be found judging Magic, playing Guild Wars 2 (badly), or following other creative pursuits. Holy Lack of Copious Free Time, Batman! While she’s always wished she had teleportation as her superpower, she suspects that super-speed would be much more practical because then she’d have time to finish up those steampunk costumes she’s also working on.