Of the Earth #5 // Review
Tabby might be hallucinating. She's out in the field. There's someone talking to her. She wakes up. She's fully away. It's not a very safe place given what’s out there beyond the potential safety of the tiny home that she’s outside. She rushes off. Pick up a gun. There's something out there. She fires at it. It's a definite sound against the southern rural landscape. Tabby’s in danger in Of the Earth #5. Writer Chris Condon reachers the penultimate chapter of an eco-horror story that is brought to page and panel by artist Charlie Adlard. Things get particularly dark before the final issue.
Thomas Morton hears a creaking in the next room. He's not alone. Doing he hangs up the phone. It's quite dark inside. He needs to make sure that the danger hasn't come inside. So you find himself moving into the natural home with a flashlight on his phone. It's not tabby in the next room. It’s Grandma Betty. She’s not saying anything. She’s got a rather large knife in her hand, but she’s perfecctly still with it. It would be totally understandable for her to feel the need to protect herself from any danger given all that’s happened.
Things speed up in the penultimate issue of a series. There's darkness everywhere. And there's more than enough action to carry the action from one panel through the next. There's a bleakness about it that seems to be reaching its climax. The tension is very vivid, even though it's all bathed in darkness and uncertainty. It's just really nice that the writing team could choose to a while or the artist to render so much. There might be other writers who would feel the need to have more said and dialogue. More written in narration. More thoughts rolling through the minds of the characters. The silence really speaks a lot in the series like this.
There really is a hell of a lot of black in this issue. It's the middle of the night and there isn't much right. It's all highlights. Everything that isn't darkness is just highlights. It's kind of weird to get a feeling for what it is that they're doing with respect to the visuals. Because it's all very demanding, but for the horror of the unknown. And so the darkness that inescapable and his penultimate issue really does carry a lot of weight. When the danger strikes it is striking out from the darkness. Perfectly visible and everything. But the mystery remains. It's not easy to bring that to the page that way that makes it seem compelling. Adlard does a good job of maintaining the mystery even in the face of the full view of the danger.
Of the Earth begins to reveal itself to be one of those rare series that works as well as a serial as it does in the inevitable collected format. It's really just one night. Just one evening of horror. The way the story is revealed, Bill, or really well in a serialized format. It doesn't even really seem to manageable that much that a month passes between each issue. The creative team does such a good job of locking in a simple and capable horror that it doesn't require a whole lot of narrative momentum. Really: just opened the cover and you're there.
