Knew a girl once who, somehow, rated a fat condo in Chicago's Old Town. Through its made-entirely-of-glass western wall I would stare, hypnotized by the city until I'd catch a housing project known as Cabrini Green, inexplicably close to us.
The Green is the dictionary definition of The Wrong Part of Town. An industrial-strength tenement slum, it seemed for a time to be the absolute epicenter of all the city's violence. It looked like a gigantic concrete meat locker, just like all of Chicago's low-incoming housing blocks. The Green was as bad as it looked: the kind of place that was built to grind up anyone put inside of it.
It was fascinating to stare at, safe and sound twenty stories up in that rich little white girl's palace.
DOMU is set in a place like that. When twenty-five residents of a low-income housing project die of apparent suicide, police eyebrows begin to rise ("We can't keep dismissing them as mysteries forever," says one cop with just a hint of regret). Investigating this near-invisible community united by poverty and misery, they find these suicides to be unrelated, unconnected, and actually physically impossible to have been accomplished.
Something horrible is playing with the minds of the residents of the Tsutsumi Public Housing Complex, and the cops have no idea how to stop it. A supernatural horror story saturated by urban creepiness, DOMU is a riveting and chilling story about what happens when the devil himself comes to play in hell.
Matt Fraction splits his time between motion graphics and design house MK12, writing comics, and reading comics. He is the author of the graphic novels The Annotated Mantooth and Last of the Independents, both available from AiT/Planet Lar. He can be found on the web at mattfraction.com. His wife is hot.
