News from the Fallout #4 // Review
There’s a guy who is making a pot of coffee. He happens to notice a rodent. This would normally be cause for a bit of alarm given the fact that the pot of coffee, the guy making it an diner. There might be people coming around who might find some level of concern in that. Word gets around...there might be government inspectors. Of course...that’s not going to happen now. There are too many zombies about to be concerned with that in News from the Fallout #4. Writer Chris Condon continues a grim and grizzly narrative from the American Southwest in the nuclear age. The story is burnt into the page by artist Jeffrey Alan Love.
They're going to have to leave the diner. Not because of the mouse or anything like that. It's just going to be very difficult to continue to survive a pain a place like that cut off from the rest of the world. So they're going to have to find it their way to the next town. Thankfully they don't have to do so long for us. There's a pick up truck. There's a shotgun. They are knives. There's a way to protect themselves from the dangers that work in the irradiated desert outside.
Condon keeps the issue from being too bogged-down with any kind of articulated ideas beyond the most basic. There's a real sense of minimalism about it. And it feels quite wide open. There's so much that is being said just in the imagery in the way it's being brought to the page. Just in the situations in the way they're resonating and radiating across everything. Other writers might feel obligated to over, render the backstory behind the whole situation. And it's not like love isn't doing that. It's just not doing that in the context of the art. There are various documents at issues and which deliver a little bit more of the detail. They add depth to everything.
The brutality continues to strike out against the page. Everybody has seen in silhouette. It all feels like it's a stain that has been blasted into the side of the page. There's a striking moodiness about it that feels kind of overwhelming in places. It would be difficult to imagine sitting down and reading this whole thing as a single trade paperback later-on. It's all just so very intense. It's all just so very dark.
Condon is clever in delivering some of the intensity of what's going on around the edges of everything with respect to the rest of the world. Those documents at the end of the each issue seem to be adding quite a bit. We see what's going on with the dramatic ensemble. And then we get a little bit of an understanding of what it is that caused all of this to happen. The two prong approach seems perfectly well suited to a truly satisfying post apocalyptic narrative. Once again, Condon delivers a powerful darkness to the page.
