REVIEW: ‘Atlantis Wasn’t Built for Tourists’

Atlantis Wasn’t Built for Tourists is written by Eric Palicki, illustrated by Wendell Cavalcanti, colored by Mark Dale, and featuring front and back cover art by Caspar Wijngaard and Natasha Alterici. The book starts off with the main character Lucas Lewis backpacking from Cleveland, Ohio across the country to Seattle, Washington to meet his father. While on his travels he stumbles into Atlantis County and almost loses his life to a drunk driver, Lauren, who happens to be a resident of the county, and the County Sheriff’s niece. He rescues her from her vehicle and carries her to the hospital in town.  As a token of gratitude, he’s met with thanks and some slight hospitality at the county jail.

However, this is shortly disrupted by a dangerous secret, Vampires, infiltrate and attack an inmate who broke curfew. Lucas goes to investigate and discovers he has a secret of his own. As time goes on Lucas becomes leerier of the town and begins to ask questions that can’t be answered, because they are closely guarded and ass he pokes more, things become more and more dangerous for Lucas.

Atlantis Wasn’t Built for Tourists is pretty well-paced so it keeps you wanting to read the next page to see what happens next. There are some parts that could use some fleshing out, but overall it’s easy to follow. There are some plot twists scattered throughout to keep the interest. Cavalcanti’s art style is dramatic and rich with good saturation. Additionally, Dale’s color palette is fairly dark to keep the tone of the story eerie and a bit tense. The lettering is never cluttered and overall clean and easily readable.

The action scenes where Lucas would engage in combat were intense, fun, and very detailed. They left you wanting more, thus when they ended, had you hungry for the next sequence. The panels flow very well, with some slight confusion on certain pages. The confusion came because sometimes the panels would overlap in weird ways and would pull my eyes downward, instead of following the natural flow of left to right. The lettering and drawings were spaced very well so it didn’t feel overcrowded. The story flowed well as a whole, but they did have some cliffhangers and some scenes that didn’t make sense since they weren’t properly elaborated on more.

For a short graphic novel, Atlantis Wasn’t Built for Tourists’ story was amazing. It was a little dull in the beginning, but by issue two I was hooked and had to keep reading. Sadly there seem to be only five issues, and being that this was Kickstarted I hope they do another campaign to perhaps continue the story.