Amber and Chelsea: The Beginning by Coll Hamilton and Carolyn Alexander

PARALLEL narratives echo in tandem across the stark and eerie world of Amber and Chelsea: The Beginning like two heartbeats thudding loud in an empty void.

Hamilton and Alexander use the 'double journey' narrative here to great effect, forcing the audience to accept events as they are presented to us, in the first instance in Chelsea's haunting monologue. 

In a world, clearly torn to shreds by something, Chelsea sits waiting in an empty devastated flat, almost as though he is waiting for us, for someone to listen to him.

His cheerful disposition is almost unsettling in this environment - emphasised by Hamilton's strong use of white space and panel composition  - but we are a captive audience and he has something to say.

Hamilton's artwork is striking, deftly moving from intense blacks and complex cross-hatching which suggest something erratic and jagged about Chelsea, and warmer, smudged pencil marks, which have the effect of moving our protagonist in and out of focus, accentuating, as the dialogue does, a constant need to reassess him. 

In the larger establishing shots of the the world outside, Hamilton's pens and pencils fade into Impressionism at the edges, letting us make up our own mind that a simple shape is a window, or that a few thick, well-placed lines are a bicycle. 

Here, as a reader, we're being challenged to fill in the gaps and let our imagination wander into a world like this.

In the other half of our story Alexander strikes a bold contrast. 

A more ordered world, and perhaps a more reliable protagonist, Carolyn's story clearly starts in either another place or another time and brings into stark relief the edgier, disconnected nature of Chelsea's narrative. 

It's rapidly clear things are not quite what they may have seemed and by the final panel, the duplicitous nature of the story as a whole is revealed to us, a sophisticated swerve that puts us on notice as to what this creative pair are capable of. 

Amber is introduced to us quickly as something of a loner. Alexander has her standing aside at a party, reading on her own in her flat and sat in a cafe reading the paper alone. 

Her relationship with her friends is presented as fractured, in the way they talk to her and in one scene by a panel border which separates the space between them ominously.

Alexander's art has a dream like quality, warmer than Hamilton's and succeeds (at least here) in painting Amber as the more sympathetic of our pair of protagonists.

Even when she crumples up the Polaroid she holds of her and Chelsea and makes her dark resolution, the fragility of her fingers warm us to her. 

Amber and Chelsea: The Beginning is a powerful prologue to a story I'm intrigued to watch develop. 

Between them, Hamilton and Alexander bring a lot of technique to the table which they use expertly to craft a creepy and intense tale, that deftly twists perspectives and shifts the balance under the feet of the reader. 

You can find Carolyn Alexander at http://www.carolynalexander.co.uk/ and on Twitter @ocarolina. You can find Coll Hamilton at http://collhamilton.com/ and on Twitter @SeeFarEnough.