The Eye Collector #5 // Review
The thing before the boy seems to have a face which seems to be unfixed. Nevertheless, it has teeth. Lots of teeth. All canines. “This can’t be real,” the boy says. And the thing before the boy seems to be having some difficulty understanding what it is that the boy means by that statement. The boy is going to have a hell of a time trying to explain the nature of reality to a walking nightmare in The Eye Collector #5. Writer Jonathan Ball continues a surreal horror with artist G.M.B. Chomichuk. A larger narrative begins to pure out from the formlessness of the horror in an issue that clearly advances towards the end of the series.
The walking nightmare explains to the little boy that the flesh behind the eyes doesn’t know the difference between waking and dreaming, so questions of “real” versus “unreal” can be more than a bit sketchy at best. Of course, that’s easy enough for a walking nightmare to say. The nightmare had always found reality to be quite flexible. Naturally, this makes the nightmare in question relatively powerful. It is particularly powerful as it speaks of a girl who the boy finds quite sacred.
There is some momentum that building in a narrative. Ball experiment with childhood notions of safety and wonder and twist them in direction that would feel substantially more sinister. A mother, a father and a son are deduct both against a supernatural being that seemed to have power over all of them. And yet on the surface, it seems so very normal. There's real power in the narrative that Ball is engaging in. It holds a tremendous amount of potential intensity. The boy is the hero in a strange coming-of-age nightmare that continues to swim across the page.
And as the story swims across the page, it does so in the pool of Chomichuk’s visuals. There is a striking sense of composition about the art, and an appealing the electric fuel to the colors that have been chosen for the story. It all feels like it's hanging together on the page quite well. There are a visual echoes that suggest a kind of 20th century normal about things that has been mutated in a direction that feels much more horrifying beneath the surface. Quite often, though, the surreal nature of the visuals, wash-out some of the intensity of the script.
Affair would be a different approach to the visuals in the story that might yield slightly better results. The earthbound nature of everyday of life is kind of missing from the page. If there is more of a balance between stable, realistic visuals and a nightmare surrealism that could really allow the story to amplify itself. The script could project perhaps a little bit better through something that felt a little bit more legible on the page. As it is, though, it looks quite impressive. And there's no questioning about the visual reality of what's being presented on the page is quite unlike anything else that is being placed on the new issues rack today.
