Thank you NetGalley and Oni Press for providing me with this arc in exchange for my honest review.

This one was right up my alley!! It felt like this could have been a The X-Files episode, a show I absolutely adored since day 1! Replace Scully with a Louis Lane like character called Emily and Mulder with a guilt-ridden and traumatized teenager called Melvin, add an incredibly intriguing subject, namely spontaneous combustion of people and one of the most unique and incredible art styles I’ve ever seen, to the mix and you get Spontaneous!

Let’s talk some more about the art first. A somewhat vague, gritty, monochrome art style that had a feeling of its own. The art combined with this eerie story gave me goosebumps more than once! And the way light and fire almost jumped of the pages, when added to the illustrations.. Impressive! It even often looked like the pages were burned or covered in soot which couldn’t fit this story better.

Melvin lives in a town called Bayville and together with his friend Kenny, he’s investigating a strange phenomena happening to some people there. The same thing that happened to his father, in front of Melvin, when they were celebrating his third birthday. He now wants to save others from suffering the same fate.

When he’s working at a shopping mall food court, a man called Hubert Michaels, who is eating there, combusts.

For me, the creepiest thing about these spontaneous combustions was that the victims didn’t react or move at all when it happend! It’s like they were hypnotized..

After the event at the food court, there’s this extremely motivated reporter called Emily, who starts asking Melvin a lot of questions. She’s looking for something to explain this and she soon learns about the investigation Melvin is conducting. They start working together to uncover the truth.

They soon start making connections with Grimm Industries, a company operating in Bayville 25 years ago, working on secret military projects but Emily also learns about Melvin’s troubled past and there’s more behind it than she could ever have guessed.

This started off really strong but unfortunately some characters important to the plot had barely any page time. I think if the plot and some of the characters were developed more and the ending was less hurried and confusing, this would have been a five star read for me. Don’t get me wrong, I was impressed with some of the story, the idea behind it and the art!

Spontaneous takes the reader on a journey through the mysterious and wild phenomenon of Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC) - the idea that the human body sometimes overheats and burns itself up from the inside out. Kelvin Reyes is haunted by SHC, since he witnessed his father combust on Kelvin's birthday.

I find legends and lore fascinating, especially when they blur the lines between what could be plausibly true and what toes towards fiction. SHC is a real phenomenon that has occurred throughout history, with really no explanation to it. I enjoyed that Spontaneous clearly took it's time with establishing the paranormal-esque baseline of the start and gave Kelvin a clear reasoning to investigate.

Unfortunately, I found it hard to get through this graphic novel. I didn't enjoy the art style as much as I hoped I would. The gritty image quality would have been interesting in certain panels, but to read an entire comic felt a bit overwhelming to me. I also found it strangely antiquated in it's writing style (repeatedly falling back on fatphobic narratives for the death of the first SHC victim in the first few pages), with characters acting more as caricatures than being fully fleshed out. I also found that the blocking of this graphic novel too closely followed the blocking of a movie/tv show, instead of allowing the art to help tell the story, it was focused on close character portraits and panels that often didn't aid in the reading experience.

My other issue with this book is the plot is very similar to a lot of other supernatural/paranormal investigation stories, down to the beat-marks as the story progresses. I would have been alright with some similarities as it's to be expected for the genre, but as it reads now, it comes across as unoriginal. The entire plot hinges on a concept I've read and seen hundreds of times, and even features a kiss between two characters (that had no chemistry up to that point). I, ultimately, found Spontaneous sloppy, both in it's narrative and overall concept.

Thank you to NetGalley and Oni Press for providing me a copy of this book for an honest review.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Oni Press for an advanced copy of this graphic novel that is both a supernatural tale, and story of a young man dealing with guilt and trauma from an early age.

When I was young, I was addicted to books about strange phenomena. Ghostly presences, mediums, trances and all the weird ways in which people would die. Spontaneous Human Combustion was one of those weird death things that I really enjoyed reading about. Bursting into flame for no reason, just seemed so weird a death, so crazy. Looking a black and white photos of a human form burned into a chair really frightened my young self. Maybe it was the fact I was a portly lad, and thought my body would make a magnificant candle. My childhood fascination could be why I enjoyed this graphic novel so much. Spontaneous written by Joe Harris and illustrated by Brett Weldele is a story about bodies bursting into flame, the guilt of one boy, and the plucky journalist who helps him get to the truth.

"Kelvin" Melvin Reyes had his life changed by fire. At the age of three his father, suddenly burst into flames, killing him, and maiming his mother, who spends her days supported by machines. Reyes has become fascinated with the idea of spontaneous human combustion, an obsession made worse by the fact that Reyes hears voice urging him to burn, and let loose, and Reyes fears he was the cause of his father's death. Reyes and a friend, a techy boy from school have developed a system to find people about to burst into flames, but Reyes has no idea why or how to stop it. A young woman with dreams of being a investigative reporter with a flair of Gonzo journalism, has given new hope and help to Reyes' quest, and he feels he might be on to something. However, the small town he lives in has a lot of secrets, and danger might be much closer than Reyes thinks.

A sort of Nancy Drew meets a Hardy Boy with a generous dash of the X-Files. With a bit of Hunter S. Thompson. The story is good and the characters are interesting especially Emily the reporter to be. I really enjoyed her character a lot and can see more supernatural stories in her future. Reyes is very interesting as a character, one who was deeply effected by what happened, and how maybe he is not the innocent that he plays. There are a lot of little things, accidents avoided, near death dodged, and a sheriff who seems to always have her child in tow. The pacing is good, but there seems to be a little vagueness on the way to the ending, but that is a small quibble. The illustrations were quite good. A mix of Charles Adlard from early X-Files comics with a sort of haze look that one gets when one stares at a fire. Smoky, a distant feeling, yet really helps convey what is happening on the page.

Recommended for readers of Jonathan Maberry, X-Files fans and for readers of Daniel Cohen who wrote so many of those early supernatural stories that I read in the library. Good story and very good artwork, and again I would love to see more stories with Emily the reporter.

The art was hard to look at for me and this idea of SHC has been being done in fiction a lot in the last decade and not a lit of people are doing it in an enough of an interesting way to justify making more of it.

I liked the gritty almost blurred feel of this comic. A visual feel all of its own, perfectly matching the story. There is a mysterious feel to the story line, and questions still to be answered. Spontaneous human combustion, real or fiction? Whichever you believe, this is a comic is for you. Thank you to Oni Press and NetGalley for the comic ARC. The views expressed are all mine, freely given.