News From The Fallout #6 // Review
They’re all out there. They’re all infected. And they’re all looking to spread. But there's at least one person who knows. And he knows what he has to do. And it's all in the desert. It's all partially populated. It's not yet grown to be what it could be. The horror hasn't completely developed the entire continent. It could, though. There's a showdown coming in News From The Fallout #6. Writer Chris Condon concludes his retor nuclear-era zombie apocalypse tale with artist Jeffrey Alan Love and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou. There’s a haunting feel to the final chapter that is pucntuated by a full debriefing that featurs minimal redactions.
He’s shouting at the living. Talking about how the last time was different. The last time as just a prophexcy of things to come. What’s happening now is a baptism. A promise made real. Change has arrived. The man he’s speaking to knows there’s ammunition in his firearm. It might be jammed, though. He knows their plans. He knows their secrets. He plans to make those secrets die with him. The spores have come and they’ve begun to consume everything once more, but he’s got a couple of pistols and a whole lot of aggression...
Condon makes one last stand with the series. Everything is just come out now. All of the secrets. All the backstory. It's really just a matter of letting it play out. And there could have been ways in which he would have made it a much more haunting, sort of an experience. And end of the world's tile experience. But that's not exactly what he's going for here. Something much more ambiguous. Something much more subtle. Around the corners of the edges of the shadows of everything. It's certainly there. It's just a matter of finding it. It's just a matter of understanding it.
Love does good work with the visuals. There is considerable power in the simplicity of everything. A lesser artist would have wanted to amplify things in a way that would have added detail. But that's not really what the script is calling for here. It's the end. And so there's going to be quite a lot of darkness. Quite a lot of uncertainty. So he's going to hand off some of the power of the visuals to the script itself. That means that there's a lot of dialogue in the darkness. That means that letterer Otsmane-Elhaou has to carry a lot of the weight of the end of the series. Thankfully, he's able to do so in a way that feels very vivid.
In the end, it's a very memorable series. It has its own strength, its own power. It's something that really couldn't be done quite in the same way in any other format. That makes it a really good graphic presentation of sequential art. To be able to do something that would quite work in any other format is something that really elevate the art form of the comic book. It's powerful and haunting stuff.
