Bone Orchard: Tenement #1 // Review
There were seven of them. Amanda. Justin. Felix. Tanya. Bob. Gary. They all lived at the same address. Something happened. It’s not clear what happened, but something happened. There’s a darkness about it. There’s something in the shadows of their lives. They’re all bound together. Writer Jeff Lemire tells their story in Bone Orchard: Tenement #1. The story is brought to light through darkness and shadow that is cast upon the page by artist Andrea Sorrentino. Color comes to the page courtesy of Dave Stewart. It’s an ambiguous opening to a mini-series that seems impossibly weighted down by the gravity of very human drama.
Isaac’s in the hallway of the tenement wearing his backpack when he overhears someone shouting at Felix. There’s someone in the building who is convinced that the noises he’s hearing are coming from Felix’s apartment. There’s some harsh language. Felix apologizes for the kid. Asks him his name. Isaac tells him. Later on, that name is written on an envelope. Inside the envelope is a key that Isaac had made at the beginning of the issue. Something has happened. Things have been set in motion. There’s no telling what might happen. Isaac has a key now.
Lemire is establishing the story of seven different people living at the same address...and he’s doing so in a way that feels enjoyably ambiguous. He’s allowing the artist to render a hell of a lot of the story nonverbally. There’s a lot of mystery lurking around the corners of the panels. Though there is a lot going on in the issue, so little of it manages to reach any explicit level. It’s all there on the page, and there’s a hell of a lot of characterization going on as Lemire allows everything to settle in, introducing the seven characters that Lemire will be exploring over the course of the brief life of the series.
Sorrentino has a gift for bringing breathtakingly real visages to page and panel. Everyone on the page seems to be caught in some very private moment as Lemire casts the artist in their direction. For an opening issue that delivers as many details as it does, the first issue of Tenement doesn’t feel at all cluttered with visual details. So much of the nature of what’s about to happen in the series plays out in the faces of the seven characters of the ensemble. Sorrentino also does a really good job of delivering mood and tone through simple movement. A man with a guitar slung over his shoulder walks down a hallway in the tenement, and it feels overwhelmingly meaningful as it casually moves down the page, revealing Isaac. It’s all so dazzlingly mundane and moody.
It’s horror. It’s subtle and sinister. There’s going to be some very, very dark stuff that’s going to hit the pages of future issues as things progress, but for now, Lemire and Sorrentino are more than content to let the mood resonate off the page before the shadows take over and plunge everything into darkness. The anticipation of that darkness is SO palpable in the first issue of the series.
