Lovesick #3 // Review
Domino spends the first four pages of the issue on her back, wondering about the origin of monsters. There’s a submissive at her feet. She’s delivering exposition while contemplating the possibility of a kind of foreshadowing. There’s so much grizzly horror in her life, it’s nice to see the anti-heroine get a moment of reflection before things get awful again in Lovesick #3. Writer/Artist Luana Vecchio continues an exploration into the darker side of human passion and desire in another issue that fails to completely embrace the potential of the premise. Domino remains a fascinating character, but deeper themes beyond the central character continue to lurk in the shadows beyond the central plot.
They’re coming for her. Crude red faces are scrawled on their black masks beneath grey hoods. They carry semi-automatics. They’re looking to kill Domino. She might be a bit philosophical about the nature of life and death, but when it’s staring her in her face, Domino is going to run just like anyone else. Her car has crashed. She’s running into the woods. There are horrors there. She will have to confront quite a lot that she hasn’t realized she’s been avoiding if she will make it out alive.
Vecchio’s story is not without depth and nuance. There’s quite a lot going on that goes well beyond the surface, but it all seems to be echoing through the same events over and over again, which keep hitting page and panel from slightly different angles. There’s blood and brutality and a chase and a hunt. There’s death and terror. It’s a dreamy nightmare of a story with the greatest monster being her own victim perpetuating a cycle. It’s an admirable walk into a very dark place in human consciousness, but Vecchio isn’t offering enough insight into the human condition to make the journey worth all of the horror.
The heaviness of the imagery tends to pummel any of the horror off the page. Domino has enough drama etched into her face to make for a reasonably sympathetic figure, but there’s such a heaviness about the ink that it all feels so overburdened with its own brutality. It can feel powerful in places, but Vecchio’s art largely lacks the elegance that could embrace the horror from a more compelling perspective. Vecchio does a good job of modulating, articulating, and even finessing the crudeness of what’s being brought to the page, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s crude.
There is merit in exploring the deeper aspects of the horror of human aggression and destruction. Vecchio is definitely moving in a direction where Domino might find her way to exploring some of the depth of the premise. After the first three issues of the series, Domino is still avoiding the depth that she should be embracing. Vecchio has had quite a bit of time to get into where the story is going after the third issue. It will be interesting to see where Vecchio takes the story next month.
