The Eye Collector #2 // Review
Sometimes he has dreams of losing his eyes. They just...go out of him. And that’s when he sees a man who tells him that he has new eyes for him. He’s always too slow in coming to see the man with the eyes. So they’re always dried out. You couldn’t even squeeze a single tear from them. His story continues in The Eye Collector #2. Writer Jonathan Ball and artist GMB Chomichuk continue they’re dreamy nightmare of a dark fantasy story into another chapter from a whole different place and time. The narrative drifts along with some potent imagery.
He’s only a child. His father tells him that he’s only safe in his dreams. There’s someone who comes in the night to sprinkle sand in the eyes of children who do not sleep so he can take their eyes and feed his children on the moon. The next day on the swing set outside he meets a girl named Clara. Her family just moved into the area. She doesn’t know anyone. She’s in the fifth grade. (He’s in fourth.) He’s going to be friends with Clara. They’re going to do things together. They’re going to visit a pathway to nowhere.
Ball is clearly moving the narrative forward in a way that makes the plot feel like it might have some kind of structure to it. The dreamy nightmare of the overall poetry of the story he seems to be very dominant, though. And so it's difficult to tell exactly what the central conflict is. Clearly it has something to do with this figure who might well be the title character. It's an interesting progression. And there are some very powerful moments in the course of the second issue. But it's difficult to tell exactly where it's all going or what the point is precisely.
Chomichuk’s visuals have a dream sort of quality that mixes realism with something else. There is a vaguely ghost light quality to the whole thing. The quality of the rendering feels pretty powerful in places. However, individual emotion can't necessarily be read on the page. Just the overall mood of what's being presented. The story doesn't move across the page so much as...drift and while this might seem like it would be incapable of truly drawing in a reader, there's no question that it does. There's a beautiful illness about it that seems to hold its own kind of gravity.
It's generally very difficult to criticize of incomplete work. It's one thing to dive into things and meaning and form in an open series. But this thing's already been completed. And what's more: it's not really a traditional narrative. So it's difficult to tell exactly where everything is going or where it's been. And there's no question that there isn't really very much like it on the book today. There really hasn't been very much like this available on any comic book rack in the history. It's really interesting stuff. But whether or not it's actually among us to anything is going to be another matter altogether.
