What I Bought 6/28/2024 - Part 1

I had to drive through Illinois over the weekend, always an incredibly boring experience. I forgot that they really want you to know how close you are to road work, but never tell you how far the road work extends. The left lane closes in 3 miles, then 2 miles, then 1, then a half-mile, but nothing about how many miles the left lane is closed, which is what I actually want to know. How long am I stuck at the mercy of the slowest driver?

Blow Away #3, by Zac Thompson (writer), Niccola Izzo (artist), Francesco Segala and Gloria Martinelli (color artists), DC Hopkins (letterer) - Leaving nothing but tracks, shadows, and possibly a dead body or two.

Brynne's fixated on what happened to the mountain climbers. Asking questions, annoying the sheriff, who it feels like Izzo is drawing in the most suspicious ways possible. Face half in shadow, odd smirks or glares. Standing in front of one of Brynne's tables, eyeing a knife while Brynne's back is turned. It's like a blaring siren, to the extent it feels too obvious, though I can't figure the angle, unless it's meant to highlight Brynne's state of mind.

Because Brynne may have handed over copies of all her footage, but she didn't hand over the recorder the climbers had that she found. She's still poring over that, parsing silent looks or the fact Beardo is reading American Psycho, going frame-by-frame through the fight until she determines that when they both went over the side during their fight, one of them either got snagged on something, or was clipped to a safety anchor.

So, even with the sheriff having wanred her of a blizzard, Brynne follows their climb up the mountain (which Izzo does as a 9-panel grid starting in the lower left corner.) She finds some blood frozen on the snow, and a deep crevasse. before she can properly climb in, a rope gets tangled around her foot and she goes in the quick way.

With the one-panel flashbacks we keep getting of some previous project of hers that seems to have blown up, I feel like we're going to learn there was nothing suspicious. But part of that is because we've got basically nothing to go off. Brynne's got some blurry footage from her cameras and a few snippets (at least that's all we've seen) from their camera. None of which points to anything concrete. There's not even a body yet. It's similar to how the sheriff's being illustrated to seem suspicious, while we've got no idea why. The main thing it illustrates now is Brynne has a tendency to draw serious conclusions off little evidence.

All that said, I do at least want to find out what's happening, which is more than I can say for this next book.

Morning Star #3, by David Andry and Tim Daniel (writers), Marco Finnegan (artist), Jason Wordie (colorist), Justin Birch (letterer) - We've gone from gun to ax. Next issue they'll be down to a pointy stick.

Charlie's still missing, but now Marabeth's being chased by a weird version of the park ranger and a bunch of animals that talk in wavy voices balloons with elongated words. Marabeth flees across a river, but finds that weird pile or orange guys her dad and his partner found during the fire in issue 1. 

Meanwhile, Jolene gets briefly menaced by some flaming specter, then a whole bunch of funhouse mirror Charlies appear, also talking in the wavy voice bubbles with elongated words, asking her to help. Help Charlie, help them, help someone else?

This isn't working for me. Maybe the creatures, illusions, constructs, whatever they're meant to be, aren't supposed to be frightening, but it feels like, for how Marabeth flees, and how freaked out it's making Jolene, they should look more terrifying. But Finnegan's art doesn't sell it. The "park ranger", with his face entirely shadowed, and the spots where his glasses would be as white voids almost works. It's at least unsettling, but nothing further.

Maybe these scenes should be taking place at night, maybe it'd be scarier if the colors were darker, I don't know. But the story isn't really helping, either. We know Jolene feels stressed and probably guilty she didn't fight harder to get her husband to stay instead of going to fight this fire, but we still haven't seen much of Marabeth's thoughts, let alone Charlie's (outside the handful of panels in issue 1 that show all these odd things he sees in the world around him.) Does Marabeth resent having to find Charlie, does she envy him, does she worry about losing another member of her family? I feel like any connection or interest I have in the characters is the result of me working really hard to do so, not the result of Andry and Daniel's writing. I don't care much if any of them survive the story, let alone if they figure out what's going on.