We finally reach the tail end of the stuff from prior months, but next week I'll get into everything from last week I bought. I'm still a month behind on The Rush, but I guess it's a good sign there don't seem to be copies available where I look. I'll take it that positive view, at least.
The layer Nettie hired is dead, of course, but some guys tracked down a bear and killed it, so that's that. Never mind it was definitely not a bear that did it. Inspector LaPointe tries again to get Nettie to leave town, but only succeeds in explaining how he ended up assigned this post. M.P. arrives, bringing gold from the site in Caleb's name, but Nettie vocally doesn't care about that, which enrages the prospectors. Still, Nettie and M.P. visit the site again, along with Tsikamin (or Bill), who works with animal hides. They find the site was "salted", meaning someone spread gold on the surface to suggest it was there. Further discussion is tabled as they hear someone dying again and find a pretty horrific cabin, plus the giant moose, now crying gold.
There's a couple of funny bits in this issue, strange as that might seem. Nettie's letter notes how quick the citizens are to give things names. The creature that killed the lawyer is dubbed "The Carrion Kid", because Nettie compared it to a crow in her first description. When LaPointe introduces her to Tsikamin and mentions he has another name, she guesses "The Redskin Kid". This goes to the second gag, where Bill will make an observation, and Nettie will ask if he's basing it off his tribe's oral history, or spiritual correspondance, only to be told no, he read it in a book. When Bill makes a comment about whether she thinks he can track the Pale because he can commune with the ghosts of the soil, she shoots back, no, can you follow the giant spider tracks in the snow.
The smartassery makes me laugh, but it also helps flesh Nettie out as a character. Even if she spent years as a dance hall girl, as she tells LaPointe, this place, this situation is outside her experience. She can't help falling back on hearsay, the sort of stuff men in taverns say about Native Americans. Plus, a certain level of superiority she feels over the people who willingly live here, chasing gold. I'm not sure the land is so happy with her disinterest in the gold. The reaction of the prospectors certainly seemed outsized and disturbingly synchronized. The way Gooden draws them, it's hard to tell what they might do, to her or themselves. M.P. may be like them soon. He started scratching at his arm about the time they began pursuing the Pale. I have got to catch up on this book.
Akutak's a shaman. He's not pleased with what's happening to Greenland, so he carves an idol and chucks it into the water, summoning forth a giant squid monster. Although between it's bulging eyes and the pointy teeth, it reminds me of Bob the Killer Goldfish from Earthworm Jim. It first appears to, Fina, a member of a fishing vessel that falls in the sea. It keeps him from being eaten by a shark, by eating the shark itself. Plus his leg. Then it cripples the propellers of a large shipping vessel. Meanwhile, the fisherman's friends aren't sure what to make of his story about what he saw beneath the waves.
It's odd the creature first emerges in a panel that states "KILL! KILL! KILL! Is all it knows!", but it kills no one. OK, the fishermen are local, maybe they're protected by how Akutak created the talisman. But it didn't attack anyone on the cargo ship. The only thing it's killed so far are a couple of sharks, because it was hungry. And I'm not sure Akutak put any limits on it. The captions state he sees himself as a doctor administering a cure, and what happens after is none of his concern. I'm pretty sure that is not how being a doctor works. Maybe the creature has to warm up before it starts killing, but, again, doesn't really match the introduction.
Ortega's style is busy in places. He works better with small panels, where he has limited space. When they go to full-page splashes, he goes overboard on the amount of shading and extra lines to try and suggest musculature or the shape of the face. In the smaller panels, either he or Maury Tanaka do a good job of shading to suggest those contours. Other than with the squid monster, I think he's trying to draw people are fairly realistic looking in clothes and body types.
I don't really understand why they picked some of the full-page splashes they did. One is the doctor standing in a doorway, telling Fina's friends Fina's been saying some weird stuff, and another is three pages later, Fina in the hospital bed, talking about the shark taking him underwater. With the latter, I can sort of the see the thinking. It's one big image, so maybe the reader stops and really takes in that Fina was getting ready to die. but it's just Fina sitting in a hospital bed, staring at his lap as he talks (and now I'm wondering why he doesn't at least get a shirt or hospital gown). The image doesn't really seize the eye the way I think you're hoping if you're giving it a full-page.
That said, I am sort of curious if Fina and his friends are going to be recurring characters in this. Are they going to confront the monster again? Are they going to figure out who's responsible and confront him? I don't know. It's at least got me for another issue.
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