Coffin Bound #5 // Review
In the surreal wasteland that was the world, God is injected directly into the bloodstream. Some would seek an alternative to addiction. One lone hero enters a quest for stability, beginning a whole new direction for writer Dan Watters' Coffin Bound. The strangely dark and grizzly poetry of Simpon's script is clawed into the page once more by artist Dani. The visuals are given the blush of life by colorist Brad Simpson. The new direction for the series promises a plot arc that feels more like another story set in the world of the first four issues than a straight-ahead continuation of the story thus far. It's a bold approach to the series' next major plot arc.
Everything's dying. God is an addiction, and God is in danger. A young heroine named Taqa is sent out into the hellscape of contemporary quasi-post-apocalyptic society to find a vulture that cannot possibly exist to prove the existence of God to maintain the addition that keeps it all flowing. In order to find the vulture, Taqa must seek out the most dangerous person in all of the wasteland: the EarthEater. What happens when it turns out that the EarthEater's on vacation? Where will Taqa search for the vulture if not in the presence of the most totally dangerous person in what's left of the world?
More than simply resonating through the weirdly dark poetry present at the beginning of the series, Watters takes everything that had been granted in the first four issues and completely inverts them in this issue. The heroine in the first four issues was the very soul of chaos. This series finds a whole new hero in Taqa, an addict ostensibly looking to preserve the power structure's status quo. Right out of the gate, she has to search for the mega-villain from the first four issues who was to be avoided at all costs...but he's not the villain in the fifth issue. Taqa's quest is to find someone who was essentially a minor supporting character (and weird comic relief) from the first four issues. It's a fun inversion of the basic layout of the beginning of the series.
The art feels every bit as beautifully unstable as it had in the series's first several issues. This isn't entirely effective, though. Dani's delicious sketchiness appears a bit less suited to the moody structure of Taqa's quest than it had to the journey of Izzy in the first four issues. Dani's visuals still pack a pleasantly disorienting punch as Taqa embarks on her quest to prove God's existence in a world of horrors. Brad Simpson breathes a faded depth into the panel with colors that feel pleasantly sickly in various shades and hues.
Watters is progressing the story in an interesting angle that's still feeding off his dark poetics. There's a remarkable concise breeziness about the moody darkness that Watters and Dani are bringing to the page. With deeper philosophical themes coming to the fore in issue five, Coffin Bound begins to run the risk of getting too deep too soon into the second major plot arc. If the past is any indicator, Watters seems to have a firm handle on the kind of pacing needed to keep things from getting too weighty.
