Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea #3 // Review
The girl fell a great distance. She’s dead. Naturally, the goddess is going to be a bit upset with her worshipper. He was to bring her to the goddess for sacrifice. He wishes to be forgiven for his failure. He’s not going to get that forgiveness. He’s going to get something much worse in Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea #3. Writer Mike Mignola and artist/colorist Jesse Lonergan continue their journey into dark fantasy in a sweeping, immensely immersive, and atmospheric issue that sprawls gracefully across the page while increasing overall tensions in the issues that lie ahead.
They put her body in a boat to bury her at sea. She’s being sent out to the afterlife. She doesn’t know it, of course. She can’t. All she knows is that she fell. Then there was nothing. Her peaceful body flows beyond the realm of the living into the beginning of the world. She sees visions of the lives she’s lived in the past. The life she will lead. And here she is at the beginning of the world. She’s going to have to adjust. They tell her what she already knows. They tell her that her name is Anum Yassa. They say that it means: “Anum’s Favor.”
Mignola passes the story of the issue through three main phases. The first is the death. The next is the conversation with the goddess. Then Anum is forced to adjust to not being dead. Mignola handles all of this with a very steady hand. Anum’s journey is set to be very wide and wondrous in its simplicity, and Mignola can’t do that if he’s cramming the issue with too many details. The resulting issue has remarkable immensity for something that only has about 20 pages between the covers. There’s an expanse within the issue that feels MUCH bigger than what’s on its pages.
Lonergan works rather brilliantly with negative space. There are some very white landscapes and very still moments. Rather than filling those landscapes with a whole lot of detail, there's a minimalist approach to it that allows the reader to fill in all of the immensity of the space around silhouettes of skylines in the distance and vast expanses of light and darkness that make the world of the series feel new and pristine. There’s a great sense of mystery in the simplicity that Lonergan is bringing to the page.
The young woman Anum Yassa has just made a major passage beyond the realm of the living. She’s got a long way to go before she knows exactly what it is that’s going on, and there IS a great deal of danger looming ominously in the distance, but for now, there’s a kind of peace that fills the issue. Mignola and Lonergan deliver a magic to the page that is so very palpable in all of the silence and empty space. There’s no reason to over-clutter the story with dialogue, narration, or intricate rendering. Let the reader fill in the empty space around it all.
