Exquisite Corpses #10 // Review
The Recluse has someone bound between a couple of trees with a web of barbed wire. She’s not just anyone, though: she’s a single mother looking for her son. The good news is that she’s still alive. The bad news is that she's just been strung up by the Recluse. Help is on the way, though. Granted: help IS coming in the form of another killer, but any help is good help in the face of death. Things continue to unravel in Exquisite Corpses #10. The writing team of Jordie Bellaire and James Tynion IV continues towards its climax with artist Marianna Ignazzi and Michael Walsh. Bellaire handles the colors.
Elsewhere, Laura has made it to the bell tower. She's got a gun. She's also got a groundskeeper who happens to be surveying the land at the time. Which means that she can place the gun in the back of the groundskeepers head. This is an antisocial behavior. The gentleman in question is part of the conspiracy to kill as many people as possible in this small town. So she would be forgiven for pulling the trigger. However, she's going to need to get a little bit of information from him first.
Tynion and Bellaire keep the plot, moving in a couple of really tightly written scenes. A lot of of what's going on around the edges of everything isn't necessarily as tense as those two scenes. Those two scenes do, however, carry a lot of of the weight of the rest of the issue. And it's not like those other scenes are an absolutely essential. The writing team is giving a full view of a lot of what's going on around the edges of this particular Halloween evening as it gradually comes to an end. There's a real tension in the drama.
Ignazzi continues with the stylishly, heavy inking as it renders the darkness of the evening. Bellaire’s colors complement, the simplicity of the drawing with wide swaths of very simple hues and shades. There's a real markings that's being brought to the page. It's really satisfying to see it delivered in this style. A much more detailed and almost photo realistic rendering would be theoretically possible with the same artist. But it wouldn't have the same impact. The murky bleakness of the action continues to deliver a powerful sense of weight and gravity to the page.
A lot of the basics of the premise continue to lurk around the edges of the narrative. And again: the real challenge in making something like this compelling lies and making it believable. It really seems like the creative team is doing a good job and keeping it ambiguous enough to seem plausible while simultaneously focusing in on the drama enough that the reader doesn't have a whole lot of time to consider whether or not something like this could actually happen in contemporary America without most of the population, knowing about it. It's all really quite well balanced on so many levels.
