White Sky #5 // Review
He’s crouched for cover behind a car. There are a couple of ghosts who want to help him find peace. They want to consume him. He’s trying to figure out why. One of the ghosts was a wife and grandmother. The other wad a firefighter. Why would they want to consume the living? There’s a simple answer to that question in White Sky #5. Writer William Harms continues his post-apocalyptic horror series with artist J.P. Mavinga and colorist Lee Loughridge. With the horror premise fully revealed, Harns’ story doesn’t quite have the shadowy gravity it did in the first couple of issues, but it’s still a lot of fun.
Walter’s friend is staring at the man sitting across from her. She’s pointing a gun at him. He’s having a cigarette. He takes a drag and asks her why she’s still aiming at him. The answer to that is easy. He shot Walter. And now there’s some concern about whether or not Walter’s going to live. She’s not exactly ready to trust the guy. He seems rather apathetic about hte whole situation, but that could be the exhaustion talking. Given the way things have been, there’s a good chance that he didn’t survive this long into the end of the world by caring about other people.
Harms continues to chart som pretty bleak territory in a horror story that pits the dead against the living in some weird and messed-up food chain. There’s a deep sense of human gravity that serves as a place of warmth in an otherwise cold and humorless story. There’s a real sense of exhaustion that’s pouring off of every page and evaporating into the ether between the panels. Nevertheless, it’s really, really difficult to put down the issue as it continues to carve its way into the darker aspects of emotional survival.
Mavinga holds incredibly restless moments on the page with the yawning abyss of a powerful stillness. The ghosts don’t seem like the abstract etherial forces that they so often appear as in popular fiction. Mvainga and Loughridge frame them as very approachable amplifications of human hunger from beyond the grave. It’s an approach that serves the series quite well. THe strength of steely determination etches itself into the page with cleverly-rendered characters who manage to seem brave and heroic even in the face of a dreary run-down shadow of humanity.
It’s kind of difficult to make it through an issue of White Sky. It can feel like quite a triumph reaching the final page.. This is not because it’s poorly-written or illustrated. On the contrary...it’s quite conpelling stuff. It’s just so relentlessly bleak. That bleakness serves as an attraction in and of itself which could prove to be quite fun once things really get. rolling on a series that’s already in its fifth issue. Hopefully the momentum can continue to build as the series continues beyond the fifth issue. It’s going to be quite a journey.
