Coffin Bound #7 // Review
Taqa has put a price on her head. She's waiting to find a kind of death so that she can find a mystic vulture. So why is she hanging out at a boxing match? This question and so many more are answered with further questions in the seventh issue of writer Dan Watters' Coffin Bound. The strangely dreamy nightmare of Watters' story is bound to page and panel by artist Dani. The murky poetic mess of the narrative is great fun. Still, the impact of major events shifts restlessly. It CAN be difficult to fully grasp the significance of any one event in what is rapidly becoming a truly unique narrative experience.
Life is cast against death and vice-versa as Taqa searches for god by waiting for someone to come and kill her. (And that's just the background.) Taqa has found some sort of love in a boxer who achieves glorious defeat in the ring. ("We are never more alive than when we are in pain," he says.) He is the life that she'd rather be with as the church encourages her to find death to lure a supernatural vulture into her presence. Other forces are searching for her, including Madame Entropy: a being so totally badass that even narration boxes aren't safe from her.
Watters' nihilistic existential poetry is crushingly beautiful throughout the issue. Plot points almost feel like a deliberate effort to weave poetic reality out of dialogue. The strange dichotomy of Taqa's search for death while pursuing life echoes out of pain. She's dating a boxer and getting a range of different blood transfusions. Entropy is just around the corner, and the vulture lurks as a skull in a birdcage atop a trench coat on the edge of everything. Taqa's success is failure and vice-versa. And the poetry is way too easy with Watters' script, but the overall significance of everything seems lost to the unspeakably dark poetry of it all.
Dani plays with a series of layers in the visual reality of the issue. Taqa's journey from one cover to the other opens and closes in full color. The black-and-white in between has a couple of different levels. There's the detailed rendering of earthbound moments in her life, which are thrown into a much heavier contrast with heavy blocks of blackness separating from pristine white in the presence of something more powerful than earthbound reality. There are a few colors between beginning and end. Still, Dani dominates the pages with black and white and red in stylishness that occasionally takes on the beautiful blockiness of ancient primal woodcuts. It's a breathtakingly, striking visual world.
This is an issue that ends with Entropy declaring, "Full stop. All is silent." There's a genuine sense of finality about it. There is an issue coming in November, though. The lack of momentum in the plot hampers Coffin Bound a bit. This isn't exactly a problem, though. After the end of everything that Watters and Dani have been delivering through the series, there's a deep undercurrent of life. The central appeal of the series from the very first page has been a sense of finality. It's beautiful, but Coffin Bound's non-traditional narrative structure makes it a bit difficult to know how to interface with it as a reader.
