Monster Pulse is a supernatural horror adventure story written for young adults, with expressive black-and-white art and truly cool and original subject matter. A couple kids in the Pacific Northwest stumble on a secret government experiment to create life from life, which pulls an organ from their bodies and turns it into a powerful and devoted monster. The organ is now permanently removed and independently alive but somehow still capable of performing its intended function. In the case of Bina Blum, her heart is now a six-foot-tall, incredibly strong and protective creature that still somehow pumps her blood from outside her body, as she can still check her pulse. The energy creatures that are seeking out specifically children to bond with are being hunted by their creators, the shadowy organization SHELL, which is taking extreme measures to capture or destroy them, regardless of the fact that the destruction of the monster means the destruction of the original organ. In Bina’s case at least, this means evading and fighting the agents of SHELL is a fight for her life!
In the midst of all this, the kids must still deal with being pre-teens. While the monsters and evading SHELL brings them together, they don’t necessarily have much holding them together beyond that. They have to deal with learning their parents are human and not always to be relied on, jealousy amongst friends, those first romantic feelings, and heavier issues like death and responsibility. One of the kids, Abel, is homeless for as-yet-unknown reasons, and has had to engage in petty theft to survive. All this combined makes an incredibly deep and riveting webcomic-in-progress. I was glued to the archive until I was caught up! These are very realistic characters, which is rarer and rarer in the ever widening pool of webcomics that are out there. The author has small breaks in between chapters, but otherwise sticks to a regular update schedule.
The Author and her Other Works
Magnolia Porter is a freelance illustrator, who created Monster Pulse partially out of a love for Pokemon and the Kids-And-Monsters genre. She’s also written the complete comic Bobwhite about young women in art school. Monster Pulse Book 1 will soon be released, thanks to a successful Kickstarter!
