W0RLDTR33 #20 // Review
She’s dying, but she’s looking for information. The gentleman she’s interviewing has the opportunity to be completely honest and open with her about everything because she’s about to die. There are so many questions to ask before she bleeds-out...questions with answers that will die with her and continue to be carried by one of the most powerful people on Earth. Things are getting very, very messy in W0RLDTR33 #20. Writer James Tynion IV continues a dark sci-fi horror story with artist Fernando Blanco and colorist Jordie Bellaire. The intriguingly distinct horror continues to carve-out a niche for itself on the comics rack.
Some of the answers are more simply than other. Yes: he’s ordered people killed. No: he hasn’t killed anyone himself. No: he clearly doesn’t have any kind of problem with it or anything like that. Doesn’t actually have any kind of problem with complete nudity in front of a woman who is dying while she asks him questions. And then there’s someone who breaks into the room with an assault rifle. He might manage to escape his own death THIS time, but things are a lot more complicated for him than he might like.
Tynion lets some of the existential horror work its way around the edges of the more obvious horror involving death on the estate of a deranged millionaire. The overall darkness of the series continues to seep-in with a mixture of surrealism, strangeness, and hardboiled contemporary crime action. It’s a bit of a strange mix. The weirdness of it might compromise the raw brutality of the action, but it DOES provide some definition for it that serves to make it a lot more interesting than the average shoot-em-up crime action fiction.
There’s a real shadow to the drama that Blanco continues to develop. The visuals continue to develop in a way that feels suitably dark with heavy inking that’s accompanied by particularly cool and dark colors brought to the page by Bellaire. There is the occasional flash of surreal digital-inspired imagery that Bellaire gracefully slides, carves and blasts across the page. So much of the issue, though, is just some old rich guy talking to a detective who is about to die. The grays in the cool colors in the shadows really dominate the overall moodiness of the issue.
It’s fun stuff when the balance works...and the balance doesn’t ALWAYS work. There are a few moments where the transition between weirdness and criminal action brutality feels a bit unpleasantly jarring, but on the whole the series seems to be moving in the right direction as it moves towards another major shift next month. It’s going to be a challenging journey for writer, artists and readers alike. The strange things about it all is...as strange as it can seem at times, it’s not like Tynion is doing anything particularly new in and of itselt...it’s only novel in the way that Tynion is mashing everything together.
