By: Terry Moore (writer, artist)
The Story: We finally learn what’s going on with anti-Rachel and the murderous little girl.
A few things (with SPOILERS): 1). Answers at the right moment. – Story driven series like Rachel Rising can only go so long without giving the readers some answers. These stories start out cool: weird things are happening and the art is awesome. But, sometime around issue #8 or so, you start to wonder, “What’s the point of all this?” Even great series will inspire this sort of feeling if they push the reader too far down an unknown path. Much of the frustration that readers feel with Morning Glories is due to this frustration.
I may not have written it in my review of the last issue, but Rachel Rising was close to that point. The issue was still good, but the questions were piling up in the back of one’s brain and the complaints would have started in an issue or two. Bravo to Terry Moore for knowing just when to pop the balloon!
2). Battle lines are drawn. – Not everything is made clear by this issue, but a lot of ambiguity is cleared up (provided that the characters are telling the truth). The revelation that anti-Rachel is actually some quasi-benevolent creature named Lillith and that the little girl has been playing host to an evil entity named Malus really paints everything in a different light. All along, it had seemed like anti-Rachel had been somehow causing the little girl to murder people. Perhaps she was just observing and trying to figure out if Malus was really possessing the little girl? It’s the kind of revelation that makes you want to revisit the first eight issues….and revisit them with the confidence of knowing that Terry Moore surely did know what he was doing all along.
Now, it appears that the Malus spirit has fled into Rachel’s buddy Jet. You wonder what reason could be behind this choice? Why pick a paralyzed, undead body? And, if Lillith (anti-Rachel) is a force of good…..then what is Rachel?
3). Wonderful and disturbing art. – There are so many wonderful little things about Moore’s art. The detail and thought that he puts into landscapes and other settings are really impressive. Then you have his really attractive women. They’re not over-chested, bikini models either. His Rachael and Lillith both look like really pretty girls who I totally would have had a crush on during college. They look like real women. And Moore draws hair really well. But then in the same comic, he can nail the disturbing too as we see the path of slaughter that the little girl has left: dead cows in the field, elderly couple with their throats slashed–heck, she even killed the dog. The art is virtually guaranteed to be excellent in every issue of RR, especially because you’ll never get a circumstance where the writer asks the artist to draw something that he’s terrible at (like horses–most artists suck at horses).
Conclusion: A very good issue that answers a lot of questions.
Grade: A-
– Dean Stell
Grade
Conclusion