Melvina’s Therapy – REVIEW

This week’s review is on a Webtoon series called Melvina’s Therapy, created by A. Rasen. If you haven’t heard of Webtoon, it’s a comic/graphic novel series platform for all kinds of artists from all levels of experience. I am not a huge fan of most popular Webtoon series, but sometimes I can find very interesting ones.

The series is about a psychiatrist, Melvina, who although seems a bit intimidating but professional at first glance, turns out to be feeding off of her clients’ past trauma, fears and paranoia. Melvina takes in clients to help them (as any psychiatrist does) but in reality she torments them to insanity, in an inexplicable paranormal way and nourishes her own soul to become immortal. This is all fun until one client that she hunted down, finds out about her scam and manages to escape Melvina’s torture.

As a back story, Melvina had a rough childhood, grew up in an orphanage and was severely bullied due to her “old” and intimidating outlook. Of course, this is her way of taking revenge and eventually, everything becomes connected, almost nothing is left unanswered (which I very much appreciated) and the plot gets more and more interesting as you reach the end. At first the whole thing seems like any other horror genre; some gore creatures, bloody ghosts, simply terrifying on a superficial level. But then, the psychological abuse of Melvina starts to penetrate deep within the characters, making the creatures, hallucinations even more horrifying. Eventually everything becomes a hellish inescapable nightmare and the clients’ experiences start to intertwine before they are resolved.

The creator of the series A. Rasen wanted to create the series drawing inspiration from his own psychological experiences and his love for the horror genre. As Rasen states, the character that eludes Melvina’s torture is actually based on the creator’s own therapist who saved him from severe depression.

As for the horror genre, each episode contains easter eggs from several famous horror movies and at the end of each episode the creator points them out with a brief explanation of what that reference represents, symbolizes within the plot. Personally, I really liked that because no matter how he kills the fun of interpretation, I liked seeing the creator’s perspective and I could lazily enjoy the story then read the explanations.

The art style is pretty unique, I think the textures and the whole atmosphere feel (and somehow smell?) like depression. The characters are drawn by hand on an Ipad and all the scenery is taken from real life pictures, then heavily edited on Photoshop. Here you can watch the whole process of that. The “creature” drawings and the execution of “body horror” were worth the attention, I think they were pretty unique.

I personally wouldn’t say this is the best horror graphic series I’ve read but it does deserve the appreciation. Here you can watch the official trailer, and also if you think this is interesting, A. Rasen is creating another horror series called Gremory Land again on Webtoon. So, check out the Webtoon page and read on!