Review by Frank Plowright

The Approach, opens with Mac, the fire chief of a smallish town woken and told that as there’s been a bad snowstorm the airport runway needs cleared because a flight is being diverted. Due to the conditions the passengers are going to be stuck at the airport. No sooner have they disembarked than a small plane comes out of nowhere and crashes on the runway. There’s just a single survivor, and when the plane’s number is checked it’s discovered to have disappeared 27 years previously. There’s little time to ponder that, though, as the airport’s power goes off. Back-up facilities restore lights and communication, but there’s not going to be any heating.

In their opening chapter co-writers Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley set up the classic horror scenario of having a bunch of people trapped in a confined area with a horror among them. Having established the premise, the next step of the formula is to set the terror loose, and after an initial encounter take a tour around many of the soon to be dead and discover their personalities.

Being as this is comics, not a horror film on an extremely limited budget, pencil artist Jesús Hervás is able to show the monster early, and supplies a terrifying design. It’s vaguely humanoid in terms of limbs, but pallid and with a monstrous mouth and half a dozen tentacles in addition to arms. Hervás has a loose style and isn’t one for extensive backgrounds, but the cast are visually distinctive and the action is visceral.

While the set-up is novel, the only significant departure from the template is the progress of one particularly nutty airport employee. Otherwise, it’s as you’d expect until the final reckoning when the writers have to solve their own problem of how to rid themselves of the monster. They’ve set this up well, and it raises The Approach, although there’s never an explanation for where the monster came from or the plane’s 27 year disappearance.