Of the Earth #2 // Review
Arleen Cooke is on the phone with an oil company. She tried calling from her cell phone, but she couldn’t get service, so she had to call with her grandmother’s rotary phone. To their credit, the Fossil Oil Company help line has a live person on the other end. It might not be enough to help Arleen out, but it’s nice to know that there are people willing to help in Of the Earth #2. The writing team of Andrew Ehrich and Chris Condon continue their horror story with artist Charlie Adlard. Color comes to the page courtest of Pip Martin.
Arleen is visiting her grandmother. When she stopped-by her grandmother’s place. she found her in the basement covered in crude oil. So after she took the time to get her grandmother cleaned-up, naturally she was going to call the oil company. Some time later a man from the company does, in fact, show-up. His name’s Thomas Morton. He seems genuinely interested in getting to the bottom of what might have happened to Arleen’s nonverbal gradnmother. He’s going to run a few tests. What he’s going to find...isn’t exactly normal...and it’s a whole lot more disturing than a mess of crude oil.
Ehrich and Condon keep the scope of the story very, very limited. It’s just Arleen, her grandmother and Tom. That’s it....at least for much of the length of the second issue of the series. The mystery of the premise is lying in plain sight. There’s a very stark sense of honesty about it all that feels remarkably compelling. The slow and gradual roll-out of the reality of the horror is part of the cleverness of the story as a whole. There’s clearly a deeper horror on the horizon as things become revealed in future issues, but the mystery is intriguing enough in the second issue to keep the pages turning.
Adlard delivers a tremendous amount of horror with very little on the page. Maybe it’s the way that emotions play-out on faces. Maybe its the way crude oil and blood splatter their way across surfaces. Whatever it is, there’s a deliciously creepy vibe about the visual element of the world that is amplified in stylish tones and hues by Martin’s colors. The hope is that the visual manifestations of the horror can maintain once the full reality of the horror reaveals itself more fully in the issues to come.
There is, of course, the real danger of the series becoming kind of silly once the full reality of the horror becomes fully revealed. A story that relies this heavily on the substance of mystery is GOING to run that risk as things progress. Two issues in, though, and the story still feels quite compelling. The three central characters feel engaging enough. There's already a sense of survival after the second issue. If the heroes managed to win out at the end of this particular series, it could really feel like a huge triumph.
