Jeff Lemire (writer), Andrea Sorrentino (artist) and Dave Stewart (colorist), Gideon Falls, Volume 5: Wicked Worlds (Image Comics 2020, from issues 22–26 of the comic)
My younger son and I traditionally give each other comics on Christmas, birthdays, and Father’s Day. Luckily, this most recent aggregation of Gideon Falls monthlies turned up in Kinokuniya a couple of days after I had done my shopping there, so we avioded the embarrassment of giving each other the same book.
I’m not a fan of this series, horror not being my cup of (something a lot less savoury than) tea. But having come this far, there’s no turning back.
This is the second-last volume, and we’ve pretty much reached the depths. At the end of Volume 5 the mysterious Dark Barn was destroyed and our band of heroes thought that would be the end of the evil they were combating, but it turns out that they just set the evil free, and nothing much happens in this volume except to see just how demonic the world has become. It’s a kind of zombie apocalypse with hideous grins.
The saving grace of this book, and of the whole series, is the brilliant artwork. Hardly a single page goes by with a simple linear narrative. As the story flips back and forth between three separate narrative threads (I think there are only three), each in its own time period though all in the same place, the artwork does all it can to heighten the disorientation, but repays close attention. In a spread where the Western story is unfolding, the are tiny insets from the futuristic one. Spectacularly, a spread near the end shows a series of cubes, and on each of the three visible sides of each cube a different story progresses towards the hideously threatening full-page image of the last page, an image that ensures that at the end of this year, like it or not, we’ll be lining up for Volume 5.
Me fail? I fly! 