Any Given Smile #1 Review: SMILE NOW, SCREAM LATER

Okay, Any Given Smile #1 got me. I saw football on the cover, horror in the title treatment and figured I had a decent idea where Stephanie Williams was taking this thing. Nope. Williams starts in St. Augustine, Florida in 1995 and builds a mystery around Tommy, a radio contest, a smiling nightmare and an increasingly nasty question: what happens when something as harmless as a smile becomes the last thing you ever want to see? The football angle is there, but this first issue is much more psychological horror than sports comic, and I mean that as a compliment.

The structure immediately gives the story some teeth. Tommy isn’t just dealing with creepy imagery. Something is infecting the edges of his life. The radio station, his family, people around town and that damn SMILE device keep pushing him toward something he doesn’t understand. Williams lets the paranoia build instead of immediately explaining the monster, and I appreciated that restraint. Horror loses a lot when the first issue hands you a PowerPoint explaining exactly what the scary thing is.

Pablo Collar’s art is a huge part of why it works. The everyday scenes feel grounded enough that when the smiling imagery invades them, you notice immediately. Faces are especially important in a book literally called Any Given Smile, and Collar knows when to keep expressions natural and when to push them into something deeply uncomfortable. Teona Farrell’s colors take that even further. The pinks and sickly neon tones connected to the horror elements start feeling like a warning sign. Once that color appears, your eye begins looking around the panel waiting for something horrible to happen.

Tommy also gives the issue an emotional center. His family scenes keep him from becoming “generic horror protagonist number 742.” There is guilt, fear and frustration building underneath him, and the book is smart enough to let those emotions coexist with the supernatural mystery. When other characters begin getting pulled into what is happening, the story expands without immediately abandoning Tommy. That balance is important because the concept could easily have turned into nothing but cool kills and creepy smiles.

When the violence finally arrives, Collar doesn’t play cute with it. The back portion of the issue gets ugly, but it isn’t gore for the sake of showing us how edgy the comic can be. By then Williams has established enough dread that the physical violence feels like the nightmare finally breaking through the wall. The warehouse sequence in particular gives us a better idea of how dangerous this thing can become while still refusing to explain every rule.

I do think the first issue throws several threads at us before any one of them has completely settled. There’s Tommy, the radio material, Gloria at the casino, the SMILE technology, the historical setting, the football element and the supernatural threat. That’s a crowded field for one opener. Williams mostly keeps the plates spinning, but issue #2 is going to need to start connecting some of this before mystery turns into confusion. The good news is I actually want those answers.

For a #1, that’s exactly where I want to land. Give me enough to understand the emotional stakes, scare me a little, show me something I haven’t seen a hundred times and then get the hell out before explaining the trick. Any Given Smile #1 does that. Williams, Collar, Farrell and Ariana Maher have a nasty little horror mystery brewing here, and the football imagery gives it an identity beyond another smiling-monster book. That final countdown doesn’t answer much, but it definitely made sure I’m coming back to find out what happens when the clock hits zero.

CRUSADERS SCORE:
4/5

Writer: Stephanie Williams
Artist: Pablo Collar
Colorist: Teona Farrell
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Designer: Brian Kolek
Senior Group Editor: Heather Antos
Assistant Editor: Michele Abounader
Publisher: IDW Publishing / IDW Dark