Odin #5 // Review
Adela has been wandering through the wilderness for a long enough to wonder whether or not she's hallucinating most of what she's seeing. But she knows she's not. Nevertheless, it's a natural reaction to the situation to want to find some grounding in everyday reality. That's not going to work here. That's not going to work now. Things are going to get much worse before they get better in.Odin #5. The writing team of.James Tynion IV and Marguerite Bennett continues his journey into darkness with artist Letizia Cadonici and colorist Jordie Bellaire.
Adela isn't really worth the rest of them. Perhaps that's why she is as defiant as she is. And perhaps that's why she's been surviving as well as she has. The one figure among them who is most mysterious seems quite impressed with her. There is one among them who is sacrificing the rest of them for some kind of power in and within the journey. She's managed to stay away from deaf for a while. With any luck, she might be able to hold out.
And the writing team pulls back on the horror a little bit. The supernatural nature of the story requires some degree of modulation. If everything gets thrown at the page at once, it can be difficult to really feel much for it. The writing team is doing a really good job of focusing on interpersonal drama in the interest of drawing the reader into the supernatural horrors which continue to haunt the corners of the page and panel. It's a really well constructed modulation between different narrow forces. It would be so easy to do this narrative in a much lazier format that relies on the supernatural. It's nice to see the psychological engaged first.
And I kind of restlessness that make it to the page. There's a great degree of physical and existential exhaustion. That's being pulled across the page in the visual. It would be all too easy to make this look very flat on the page. However, Cadonici and Bellaire make it all dreamy and nightmare enough to maintain that continues to haunt the page. It's all very carefully rendered. Bellaire does a particularly good job of animating a sense of spectral illuminati in a chilly evening between two covers.
It's kind of a minor detail, but it's actually really, really cool. The episodic nature of the story really comes out issue per issue. There are a little details that add to the experience of reading this particular miniseries issued by issue. All too often it just tends to blur together as a big collection for trade paperback. Bennett and Tynion manage a really clever, serialized story that features a really natural introduction point with each issue. The protagonist is trying to frame things in her mind at the beginning of every issue as it gets progressively more and more disturbing and horrifying and surreal. And then the script launches into the next chapter in the series which inevitably whines further into the darkness. Very clever stuff.
