I Was a Fashion School Serial Killer #5 // Review
Rennie steps out of the elevator carrying an umbrella. She’s stepping into a big interior. She’s clearly overdressed for the space. It’s a mess lit by flaming metal barrels. On the far end of the room there are a few people with guns. There’s a girl tied to a chair. There’s a gag over her mouth. Rennie is there to free the girl. She’s outnumbered and outgunned. This isn’t going to matter in I Was a Fashion School Serial Killer #5. Writer Doug Wagner concludes a remarkably enjoyable horror drama with artist Daniel Hillyard and colorist Michelle Madsen.
Rennie didn’t step out of the elevator with any kind of firearms. She’s really just carrying the umbrella. That’s all. She knows what she’s doing, though. She may be a little bit unhinged due to recent events, but she’s got the kind of fearless determination and ruthless efficiency that makes for a really good fashion designer. She’s also got a solid sense of creativity and improvisation that’s going to serve her quite well. The school in question might have turned out to be a mistake, but it’s not like she won’t have an opportunity to graduate in a way...
Wagner closes-out the central conflict of the series in a way that feels resoundingly final in many ways. The script matches Rennie’s overall psychological state. It would have been all too easy to filter the drama through her eyes without any care towards the structural integrity of the narrative as Rennie navigates her way through to the final panel. Thankfully, Wagner keeps just enough distance from Rennie to be able to keep the narrative clear and coherent without totally overpowering the mystery that is driving the center of the drama. It’s a clever balance that serves the closing chapter of the series quite well.
Hillyard grants the big series climax a considerable amount of visual depth. There’s a lot of empty space on page and panel, suggesting a strong sense of mood that is amplified gorgeously by Madsens’ colors. This is easily the bloodiest issue of the series. As such...the horrifyingly bloody visuals could have come across with more silliness than anything. Hlillyard and Madsen keep a sharp balance between gore and comedy that reaches a flavor of horror that doesn’t feel like a million other horror comic books. Through it all, Rennie’s face remains quietly inscrutable as she moves across the page.
The mystery of Rennie lingers long after the final panel. So much of what Hillyard had been brining to the narrative in the first four issues of the series could have easily been anti-heroic amplifications and distortions of reality. It seemed like a lot of what. Rennie was capable of could have been dismissed as pop action horror conventions. With the final issue, Hillyard and company render a closer look at those aspects of the mystery of Rennie which make a strong, skillful and stylish case for continuing on with Rennie in a subsequent series or two. There’s still so much that we don’t know about her...and at issue’s end, Hillyard suggests a direction for a subsequent series that could be really, really fun.
