Exquisite Corpses #4 // Review
Lady Carolina is going to an auto dealership. She’s in the market for a car, but the dealer isn’t exactly expecting her to choose the modest vehicle that she’s looking at. Then a man’s hand suddenly becomes detached from the rest of his body and everyone loses interest in what the Lady is interested in buying with respect to an automobile. Things develop further in the big competition as Exquisite Corpses reaches its fourth issue. The writing team of Che Grayson and James Tynion IV continue their action horror series with the art team of Adam Gorham and Michael Walsh.
There’s a cat driving the car. In the back seat there’s an angel and a little boy holding a fox. A woman wearing a fox mask approaches the car and warns them to leave. It’s Halloween, so a woman wearing a fox mask doesn’t exactly look suspicious until she flashes the blade of a sword. She’s warning them to stay away. She’s got business to concern herself with at a certain car dealership that happens to be getting a visit from Lady Carolina. The Fox Mask Killer has business with her. They have a shared past that needs to be addressed.
Tynion and Grayson keep the action moving with some sense of class and style. The showdown between two of the contestants in a car dealership is actually remarkably clever. So much of what this type of earthbound horror needs is a solid grounding in everyday reality to amplify the intensity of the blood and gore. A perfectly mundane setting like a car dealership is a perfect setting for a big showdown like that. So much of the rest of the issue focusses on minor plot points that aren’t nearly so interesting as Fox Mask and Lady Carolina, but their ineraction is well worth the price of the issue.
The small-town East Coast American setting of the series feels fully realized in the art. Gorham and Walsh aren’t going for a photo-realistic feel for the artwork, but there’s a kind of an impressively earthbound simplicity about the rendering that keeps it all quite vivid. The car dealership in particular is kind of impressive work. The artists don’t try to over-render the detail of the lot. There’s just enough on the page to suggest that vivid location that’s familiar to just about everyone. The action that hits the page slices through with a gorgeous sense of intensity.
It was inevitable that there would be an issue in the series that might not necessarily feature an overt elimination of one of the contestants. It’s interesting to see how everything is progressing with respect to the overall rhythm of the contest. Though there is a certain amount of elimination that’s going to have to gradually happen over the course of the series, there’s no question that there is going to be the occasional bloodbath, so relatively light issues like the fourth one could make for a potential bloody climax towards the end of the series.
