The comic industry has a short memory, as titles are hyped on approach to their first issue and often forgotten shortly thereafter. On to the next is the typical mindset, with what’s new leading the way for readers, comic sites and beyond. Post Hype Machine is an occasional column on SKTCHD built to work against that trend, as it will exclusively be looks at — that’s right, I’m not calling it a review, I’m calling it a “look at” — titles in their second arc or later.

It didn’t take long for me to realize I was going to love Nights.

In fact, the first page of writer Wyatt Kennedy, artist Luigi Formisano, colorist Francesco Segala, coloring assistant Gloria Martinelli, letterer M.L. Mirabella, and editor Alana Fox’s Image Comics series immediately made it clear that I was about to read something different and, quite possibly, special. And the incredible thing is, it wasn’t even your typical mix of art and writing. It was a simple page, one that was comprised of a black background with a green band through its middle, with that containing a few sentences of white text in four different languages. Here’s what it said.

“Florida is owned by Spain. America consists of 31 states. Vampires, ghosts, and other supernatural creatures are common and benign. The internet is infantile and irrelevant.”

That’s it. In isolation, that might not move the needle for you. It’s just four sentences! But what a quartet they chose. That open quickly established how different this world was, setting the stage for what readers were about to dive into while also making it clear that this team was doing its own thing. On the strength of its first page, I knew Nights existed in a place similar to ours, but different enough that its possibilities were endless. It created excitement and prepared me for the story to come, which is an exceptional way to start a new comic. But that was only the beginning. Who knew where it could go from there?

So, I did what you do as a reader.

I turned the page.

By the end of the issue, I knew my initial instincts about the book were right. This comic was exceptional. But they were also wrong. I may actually have set my sights too low. Nights Season One, Part One — its recently released first collection — wasn’t just exceptional. It’s my favorite comic I’ve read all year.

That’s for many reasons, some of which we’ll get to today. But to understand any of them, you need to know what this comic is. Nights is set in the world its first page established, one where things look much the same while being very different at the same time. It’s about four friends, a quartet that’s also each other’s family 15 in a very real way, each of whom is doing their best to navigate the typical challenges of youth like love and self-doubt and identity issues and doing so while existing in a world where your best friend could die and just continue to live with you as a ghost. In a different location with different rules, it’d be a charming coming-of-age story in the vein of Rick Famuyiwa’s film Dope. But setting this story in this world changes everything — and in a very good way.

Each of the leads is a perfect gateway into their home of Santa Pedro, Florida, whether it’s the 185-year-old young woman who is also “the greatest vampire who has ever lived,” the teenaged newcomer who falls in love with her, his haunted mercenary cousin, or the ghost friend who stuck around on this corporeal plane 16 to ensure his family of friends doesn’t fall apart. 17 They’re ideal guides to this world because Nights isn’t really about anything, at least not in a traditional sense. It has a plot, of course. But at its heart, it’s a snapshot of what it’d like to be young in an even more insane world than we’re used to, one where the extraordinary is completely ordinary.

Nights merges the real with the unreal in a rare way, and that helps its character beats feel even more grounded. There are big, crazy mysteries and plot points and everything else. But it’s all built from the people in the story and their relationships. Those roots are what make its larger story special. Even as Nights tours genres 18 and fuses tones, its nature as a medley of everything never feels like the mess it could in be in someone else’s hands. Instead, it just feels like life, in the way our everyday existence is a little bit of everything — drama, comedy, thriller, adventure, etc. — depending on the moment.

That’s where the magic of Nights truly lies. In an era where everything is a high concept and what’s old is constantly new again, Nights is fiercely original and impossible to pin down. It has its own identity, something that makes it completely unlike anything else on the stands today. And it’s all the more appealing because of that.