Exquisite Corpses #11 // Review
Fire surrounds Oak Valley. The survivors are huddled together as the few remaining killers continue to circle at the end of the evening. The evening is getting to be pretty late for the people in charge of the contest as well. Invariably, people are going to start making mistakes as the contest winds down to the last two contestants in Exquisite Corpses #11. The writing team of Che Grayson and James Tynion IV wind-down the horror action drama with the art team of Gavin Fullerton and Michael Walsh. Color comes to the page courtesy of Jordie Bellaire.
Mike is nowhere to be found. And then...he’s found. They got to him too. Now he’s dead like so many others in Oak Valley. Thankfully, there IS a school bus that might be able to get out of town if it can shoot through the fire. The bad news is that not everyone is going to be able to make it into hte bus. There are going to be a whole bunc of other people who are going to have to find other vehicles to get out of town. Thankfully, they’re not in nearly so much danger in a larger group. The remaining killers are really more of a threat to each other than they are with the townspeople...
Things get pretty brutal towards the end of the series. And the deck it's just a little bit more graphic and certain places in certain ways. There's a lot that is moving across the page that feels like it's intensifying. I am the script. Does a really good job of moving things along much more quickly even though the overall pacing feels more or less as steady as it had been over the course of much of the series leading into the current issue.
The rendering of the brutality is done without a great amount of detail. And this does aid the horror quite a bit. Some of the more gruesome scenes come across in silhouettes and heavy ink. Heavy shadow. There's quite a lot going on with respect to the color as well. Bel-Air doesn't a really good job of varying some of the emotional impact of some of the scenes by choosing really solid and simple blocks of color. Theoretically, she could be doing more to render depth to the page, but she would be taking away far too much of the simplistic brutality of the visuals if she was going to try to add too much in around the edges with color effects.
It's really nice to see a series like this as many deaths as there are. Looking back on this series that as it is, it's really pretty remarkable. How many characters were introduced in how many were simply killed off. There's a very strong dedication to the premise that has served as the central pulse and heartbeat of this series. People are going to die. It is a serial killer drama. And it's serial killer is against other serial killers. So there's going to be some rather prominent people who are going to die in the course of the CPS. Actually kind of refreshing to see that kind of finality in a comic book series.
