Phantom Road #13 // Review
It’s somewhere in Wisconsin. Everything’s awash in red light. Hugo Hamm has a gun pointed at him by a man in a loud Hawaiian shirt. It’s okay: Hamm’s got more guns pointed at the man. Heavier firepower. Still--all it would take would be a single squeeze of a trigger and it wouldn’t matter WHAT firepower Hamm had on his side. Things are getting a bit tense in Phantom Road #13. Writer Jeff Lemire and artist Gabriel Hernandez Walta continue a taught thriller with colorist Jordie Bellaire. There’s a grand sense of nonverbal resonance in an earthbound issue that still manages to feel big and epic.
Elsewhere, Agent Donald Weaver is in a vast, decaying desert. A small army of zombielike figures seem to be approaching somewhere in the distance. He’s got a gun. Shoots one of them in the head. One less threat to worry about...but there’s no WAY there are enough bullets in the magazine to save him from whatever the hell it is they’d do to him if they ever got close enough. All he can do is seek shelter in a decomposing restaurant. There are nightmares in that place that might just prove to be more dangerous than any zombie.
Lemire paces the action of the issue quite well. It’s incredibly difficult to bring the horror of a zombie to the comics page with any degree of success. Lemire does a good job of framing the creeping menace just beyond the immediate for Agent Weaver. Tensions involving Hamm are quite well-articulated too. The intensity of the drama is set-up in just the right way to feel completely justified when the tensions erupt into violent action around the heart of the issue. Lemire’s overall plot composition feels impressively textured throughout another thoroughly satisfying issue.
Without a hell of a lot of dialogue or narration, Lemire places a lot of trust in the hands of Walta. The artist has a gorgeous sense of depth and empty space that forms like...90% of the visual appeal of an issue of Phantom Road. There’s a delicious sense of emptiness about the visuals that serve the series well. The progression of action is quite well-executed as well. There’s a masterful sense of movement and listlessness in Hamm’s scenes that feel absolutely breathtaking in places. It IS a very dry and desolate action thriller, but that dry desolation sets Phantom Road apart from everything else on the comics rack today.
Lemire and Walta have conjured a big, sweeping story that’s going to work a lot better in collected editions than it does in any single issue of the series. While it IS impressive to see such wide-open spaces of horror bound into a comics pamphlet, the story playing-out in individual issues feels sluggish and spastic as it restlessly jolts through 30 pages or so before settling-down for another month until its next narrative spasm. It’s just...weird to see something the moves with such slow, deliberate beauty fragmented into a series of single issues.
