By: Terry More (writing, art, lettering, everything)
The Story: Hard to describe. As Rachel continues trying to get her bearings, the bodies keep accumulating.
Review: This issue really defies my bullet-pointed review format because this issue is very much like watching a TV show between two commercial breaks. There IS a start to the action and a tasty cliffhanger-ette at the end, but it just doesn’t lend itself to chopping up into discrete pieces. That’s likely due to the seamless nature of the work as it all springs from the mind of one man.
UNSETTING. That’s the word I’d use to describe this issue and series. It is very deliberately paced, but that’s to be expected as we’re just getting started with the story. All we really know is that Rachel has woken up in a shallow grave with a strangulation mark on her neck and red eyes and she’s trying to figure out what happened. At the same time, there’s another young attractive woman around town who is able to inspire people to kill. Last issue she got a ~10 year old girl to smother her ~18 year old sister with plastic wrap. This issue she gets a man to toss his fiancée off a roof. Clearly (since it is in the story) this evil woman and Rachel have some kind of connection, but we really don’t know much else. However, it is unsettling as hell.
But, what makes this issue such a success are the subtle things that really have nothing to do with the story. Like when Rachel barfs up a piece of twine. WTF? Why did she have twine in her stomach? Or the way Moore masterfully shows body language and facial expression. The evil girl looks like bad news, but you can’t really tell why.
The man who kills his fiancée has such priceless expressions too and those expressions allow Moore to adopt a “less is more” approach with the script. He doesn’t have to belabor the panel with a word balloon describing the man’s emotions, because you can just tell what he’s thinking. This is cool for a couple of reasons. One, comics are always more effective when they leave items like that slightly vague. The reader can pretty much tell where the man is emotionally by his body language and facial expression. Let’s just say that Moore’s art gets you 90% of the way to the whole story. But by leaving it 10% open to interpretation, Moore is allowing the reader to form his/her own personal connection with the events and that is brilliant.
The other incredible thing about the way Moore does this is that he KNOWS he can pull it off. I love confident artists. So, it isn’t just that Moore thinks he’s accomplished his objective in a panel and maybe if he showed it to his Mom, she’d agree with him. He KNOWS that readers will buy it too so he can do some really subtle things with just his artwork and get the emotional reaction that the story demands. You’d have to think that a younger or less experienced artist would have a little bit of doubt in the back of their brain (“Hmm… Will the reader really get what I’m doing here? I should probably put in a word balloon just in case.”), but Moore just moves forward with the story in a confident fashion.
Conclusion: This is a hard comic to review in single issues because it is very much a small part of a larger whole. That being said, the story advances in this issue and there are some great examples of an artist succeeding via subtlety. We need more of that in comics.
Grade: A-
-Dean Stell
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