Coffin Bound #2 // Review
Izzy Tyburn is on the run from a relentless killer. The only way to save herself just might involve finding the person who sent the killer out after her as Coffin Bound reaches its second issue. Writer Dan Watters’ second venture into the post-apocalyptic horror wastelands of madness continues in the inky blackness of art by Dani. The dark fantasy of a world beyond the life that’s not yet dead possesses a fun poetic power in a story involving Izzy’s meeting with old friends on her journeys with a vulture man with a cage on his head.
Some forcibly take body parts from others. Some take their own bodies. Some take the bodies of others. It’s not a pretty life in the world of Coffin Bound. Izzy is on the run from the EarthEater who is slowly relentless in his search for her. So she’s got some time and decides to meet-up with an old lover. There’s a girl there who has grown-up much since the last time Izzy saw her. The girl wants her to stay, but she needs to keep moving as certain investigations bend her away from lost loves.
Watters’ horror is potent. The intensity of the story seems to overpower the run of the narrative, and it seems to be scattered about the periphery of Izzy’s journey. She’s not been a victim of any of it yet. By showing the horrors of the world around Izzy, Watters is delivering a very powerful sense of danger. In the world that is coming to close-in on her. The horror of the phone exchange with Izzy’s manager is particularly potent and poetic. The image at issue’s end is every bit as horrifying. It’s a very dark path that Watters’ treading here. It’s powerful stuff.
There’s a delicious decay at the heart of Dani’s art. Her work present here has a disordered scratching about it that selectively shows just enough detail to reveal an image of the world somewhere around the end of civilization. It’s as though a more detailed rendering had been there, but has faded out in the light of the sun. Heavy black splotches of form and contour dominate panels also populated with emaciated scratches of detail dendritically clinging to voids of space in and around the edges of everything. The style is nothing if not moody. It radiates out from the horror of some pretty grizzly moments in the narrative as well.
The story unearthed in this issue grabs hold of the reader with slickly sick visuals and feverishly scattered poetry. Coffin Bound is not the most appealing experience between two covers to make it to the comics rack this month. But it’s definitely going to leave a mark on anyone curious enough to want to pick it up. It’ll probably take about another month for the scars of this issue to fade....just in time for Coffin Bound #3.
