Through

A loner is forced to confront her past in this gloomy graphic novel from Late Night with the Devil actor Dastmalchian, drawn by Scaggs (Crosswind). Alix, a college student with a fiercely independent and combative Valkyrie spirit, likes to imagine that she hasn’t needed anybody since being orphaned as a child, when her parents died in a car crash. After saving a stranger from drowning—and discovering he has been following her—she embarks on a quest to uncover his identity. But the closer Alix gets to discovering what the man was after, the closer she gets to facing the pain of her long-held grief and isolation. Her real-world amateur investigation is paired with a parallel dream-realm search, after she falls Narnia-like into a fantasy world populated by characters such as a “shadow queen” and “master builder.” A little girl who looks like a broken, poorly repaired porcelain doll acts as a video game avatar, leading Alix on a symbol-laden quest that may reveal the childhood secrets she prefers suppressed. Dastmalchian’s sometimes hurried script shows flickers of potential as a mystery where the whodunit is more about healing than justice, but the impact is limited by schematic writing and Scaggs’s stiff figures, and the too-easy resolution fails to deliver the intended emotional catharsis. This feels like a pilot that’s not ready for prime time. Agent: Allie Gruensfelder, the Syndicate. (Mar.)