A beautifully illustrated saga, Joe Death and the Graven Image trade paperback from Dark Horse is a tall order.
Running 152 full-colour pages, “JDATGI” is a spectacularly deep read. Its writer and illustrator, Benjamin Schipper digs into olde Englishe wordings, which has the effect of slamming the brakes on the narrative for today’s typical comic reader. You will need to slow down and buckle up.
“Sweeping stone floors never agreed with me. My sights have always been higher than my stature”
“It was not so when we last talked.”…
“The consortium owns that chair and by sitting on it the sitter is also owned. What marks have they lain upon you?”
Anyway, kids, you get the picture. it’s Olde Shakespearean Stage Play Englishe competing with middle American Cowboy Lingo, like this:
“Hold yer horses mate. We’ll bring you up to her lordship. but she ain’t the law… no she ain’t. Not while the Govner’s still kickin’.”
And it’s a pity, really. The visuals, courtesy of Schipper are also a bit stylistically cryptic, but honestly, beautifully played, balanced, and composed. There are a lot of truly gorgeous multiple-page sections that run free without any dialogue at all, letting the characters and visuals tell the story in pantomime. Amazing. But then the dialogue starts again.
The story? Joe Death goes a chasin’ a mean bandit called Scary Harry, who done tooken off with a little wee baby, all the while having just massacred a village of innocent people. A true injustice, a saga, a stage play, and heaps of heavy stepping in the canyons and the valleys of the dead. But if this turns your crank, have at’ er.
Dark Horse, Joe Death and the Graven Image, $24.99 for 152 pages
Newsdesk