Exquisite Corpses #5 // Review
Someone asks Bruce if he’s okay. It looks like he has a pretty serious injury. (He has, in fact: Bruce has lost his right hand.) A paramedic tells him that he’d better see a doctor as soon as possible if he wants to be able to keep his arm. He’s not seeing a doctor, though...not until he speaks with the sheriff. There are going to be further issues with Bruce and everyone else in Exquisite Corpses #5. The writing team of Jordie Bellaire and James Tynion IV continue their murder horror drama that is brought to page and panel by the art team of Claire Roe and Michael Walsh. (Co-writer Bellaire also handles the colors.)
The sheriff is nowhere to be seen. There’s no phone service going out of town. It’s complete isuolation and there are a bunch of killers on the loose. This is by design. There area few elites who are running a game. They call the whole town “the playing field.” It’s a game and the game involves people killing as many other people as possible.The residents of the town don’t necessarily know that yet. They’re stating to realize the full scope of just how bad things have gotten in town, though...
The focus on some of the rsidents of the town adds a bit of momentum to a series that has felt largely grizzly and hjaded to this point. The competition continues. Theoretically, Tynion and Bellaire could focus exclusively on the competition between the killers and leave it at that and it would be a perfectly satisfying series. Broadneing the scopre of the rama to inculde the killers, their sponsors AND all of the potential victims runs thr reisk of compromising the integrity of the plot, but it all seems to flow pretty solidly from cover-to-cover thanks to clever scripting and a very tight sense of pacing.
Roe and Walsh render a messy sort of an energy that hits the page with a respectable defree of energy. The heavy inkes feel messy in places, but that’s actually to the advantage of a series that seems so mruky and moody. Bellaire’s colors cast the messy murkiness in a shadowy visual radiance that makes it all the more palatable. Bellaires strikingly simple cooloring matches the rendering of Roe and Walsh quite well. The ugliness of a murder competition might have a bit more impact with slightly more detailed rendering, but it’s a great deal of fun regardless.
There exists the possibility that the series might end in a way that would be cunte-rintuitive to the competitino model that has been promoted in the series’ brackt system printed at the end of every issue. There’s some suggestion of this as some of the potential victims start to emerge looking abit heroic in the fifth issue. An ending that doesn’t feature a clear winner would be a bit of a disappointment given the somewhat rigidly-defined format of the series, but it could turn a fun idea into something brilliant if it’s twisted in the right direction.
