WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The Plot #1-4, by Michael Moreci, Tim Daniel, Josh Hixson, Jordan Boyd and Jim Campbell, on sale now from Vault Comics.
Monsters have long stood as a metaphor, but The Plot is forthright in its depiction of mental illness even in light of its monstrous twist. In the first four issues, collected in a trade paperback released in March, readers are introduced to a family dealing with the stigma and effects of mental illness. The family history is rooted in mental illness, with symptoms that have plagued them for generations. Many of these symptoms are signified through monsters and each of the main family members is hunted in a different way.
In The Plot #1, Chase Blaine is drunk and alone in his home, surrounded by utter darkness and many empty cans. Charles, his brother, runs a pharmaceutical company that is working to prove mental illness can be genetic, but then he and his wife are killed by a monster. Chase takes custody of his niece Mackenzie and nephew Zach. The Blaines move back into the family’s longtime home, where everything continues to unravel. Every crevice of the house and land is teeming with generations of proverbial -- and literal -- monsters.
As The Plot follows the three Blaines, they attempt to deal with their own turmoil as monsters continue to stalk them.
Mackenzie is the older child, with the expectation that she will look out for her brother. When she first enters one of the rooms in the house, she notices that a family portrait is hung upside down. One of the faces turns ghoulish before it crashes to the floor. Having the portrait upside down clearly represents how the family feels like everything has turned on its head. Mackenzie wasn’t ready for her entire world to change or to truly face the things in her family’s genes. Her overwhelming anxiety from everything sinking in is further displayed when something starts to overtake her before she falls to the floor.
Then, readers see a grotesque tree with her undead mother at the center chanting, “Too much Blaine blood.” In an earlier scene, her mother said the same thing to her father, so Mackenzie has heard this sentiment before. She obviously fears her family tree -- this scene demonstrates the constant intrusive thoughts which come with many forms of mental illness.
Their parents' deaths hit Zach much differently than his sister, especially because he is at an age where traumatic events are much harder to grasp. When he is first introduced at the funeral, he has become non-verbal to anyone but his dog. After moving into the family home, Zach plays near the bog and a creature beneath the water’s surface speaks in menacing, black word bubbles. It drags him underwater until he is too far down and is surrounded by hands pulling for him.
Water is used throughout the first volume of The Plot to show how mental illness can feel like sinking. Zach’s grief over the loss of his parents pulls him under both figuratively and literally as the monsters attempt to drown him. This is the first time he speaks in the comic -- and he doesn’t just speak, he screams for his sister. He needs her support to work through everything that has happened, but she’s struggling just the same. The monster’s attack on Zach demonstrates how the Blaine family are destined to be pulled under the weight of their family history with mental illness.
Meanwhile, Chase Blaine has been running his entire life from the monsters in his bloodstream, which manifest for him as addiction. Now that he has stopped running to take care of the kids, the monsters finally start to overtake him. In one scene, his brother appears behind him and Chase doesn’t see him, but the reader does. Chase chooses to avoid his pain and anguish by numbing it through alcohol, which means he literally can’t see the monsters coming until it’s too late.
During some construction on the house, Chase breaks a hidden wall in the basement and reveals a corpse and a flood of water, which washes over him. For the first time, Chase is seeing the horror head-on. However, the water doesn’t appear to be real -- it’s symbolic, much like the monsters that haunt him and his family. It’s the first time he isn’t running from his issues, but rather heading straight towards them by taking responsibility. He gives so much of himself to take care of these kids. The town hates the family, he just lost his brother and now his entire world has been turned upside-down, so he is beginning to lose his struggle with mental stability.
Chase’s alcoholism also doesn’t keep him safe from the monsters. During a bar fight wherein he is visibly drunk, everyone in the bar is shown in villainess shadows at first. Then, the people blur into shadowed hands pushing him down in a visually similar way to Zach’s incident. The bog isn’t literal, but again, it’s pulling him under to drown.
The Plot #4 ends when Chase enters the attic and finds a family journal. The door in the attic slams shut as the room starts to fill with bog water and the final panel is Chase completely submerged in the eerie green water, surrounded by pages of his family’s past. When he finally pushes past the creeping horror of facing his mental illness and his family history, it’s overwhelming enough to drown him.
Although the monsters in The Plot serve as metaphors for mental illness, they are also very literal -- as is the Blaine family’s attempts to cope with mental illness itself. The Plot handles the subject through the lense of horror, which is effective because it doesn’t utilize monsters solely as metaphor and because it doesn’t shy away from the real-life horror of mental illness. Although this series is fictional, it has a very real grasp on its subject matter, which makes it stand out in the horror genre and comics as a whole.
The Plot Vol. 1 is available now from Vault Comics.