Dust to Dust #7 // Review
There’s a church out by Mount Zion Cemetery. The preacher is gone ministering to a shut-in. S the church is empty except for a couple of people who are looking for a private place for a little bit of intimacy. It should be fine. Really. The preacher won’t be back for a while and there’s nothing wrong with using an empty space for a little bit of pleasure. The only thing is...there’s a sound outside. Sounds like there’s someone out front of the church in Dust to Dust #7. Writer Phil Bram and writer/artist J.G. Jones continue the murder mystery horror serial into another series of sepia tone scenes conjured from another era.
The man and the woman inside the church don’t know it, but the sound they’re hearing outside of the church is a baseball bat that’s being dragged across the front of the church. The gentleman collects his clothing and heads off to investigate. Imagine his surprpise when he sees a figure wearing an old gas mask from The Great War. Imagine his horror when that man attacks. The two in the church aren’t the only ones he’s going to be attacking on this particular day.
Bram and Jones drag their horror drama further into the dry and dusty light of day. The horror is much more graphic. The violence is much more explosive. Bram and Jones had been working with subtle shades of nuanced tension in the earlier issues of the series. By the seventh, things have gotten quite graphic and lurid. Things are starting to unravel in a big way as the Great Depression continues to strangle the tiny town in Oklahoma. The action continues to wrestle its way across the page in slow and foreboding moments that march across the page to the inevitable end next issue.
The art has a resonance about it that continues to look like a series of old low-res glass plate crime scene photographs. It’s a breathtakingly creepy visual manifestation of a horror story, but it lacks the dynamic movement and motion that would be required to really bring across the action that the script is calling for with this penultimate issue of the series. This is really too bad as the visuals are strikingly effective otherwise and quite unlike anything else that typically appears on the comic book rack. Jones’ style is so vivid and iconoclastic. Had the script merely decided to focus on the imagery around the edges of the brutality, the art style would have been much more effective.
There’s one issue left to go in the series. Things are really beginning to collapse in the small town. The overall impact of the series will ultimately rest on the final 12.5% of its run. There’s been so much build-up to the big climax that the success of the series is really going to rest in those final few pages that appear between the covers of the eighth and final issue of hte series.
