Author Joe Hill worked with writer David M. Bother to bring Hill’s novella, Rain, to comic book format from Image Comics. And now the five-issue miniseries has been collected as a trade hardcover.
It’s a horror adventure. It’s “All-American”, this one. America-centric. In Boulder Colorado, one day a dark cloud rains crystal out of a typically bright clear sky. The crystal rain is in the form of long nails, which of course kill anyone they hit. So, thousands of people die in the continual downpour of crystal nails. A young woman, Honeysuckle Speck, sees her girlfriend die a horrible death, punctured 700 times by crystal nails. So Honeysuckle takes off, leaves town on a journey.
Illustrator Zoe Thorogood serves up solid renderings, eccentrically drawn characters, jagged edges, nightmarish black lines with Chris O’Halloran on flat pastel colours. Zoe’s layouts are whimsical and ‘open’, with plenty of white space. They contrast the suffocating atmosphere of the garishly mutilated faces and bodies, the nutty and irrational extremist creeps, the blood, the guts, and the dust.
It’s a lively balance, the reading of which is gripping, but inevitably tragic and depressing. It’s partly about hope, but mostly about the ills of current American society, its religious ferocity, its inability to tolerate differences or a middle ground. It’s extreme, unsettling, and compelling. It’s The Wizard of Oz dipped with Blue Meanies, The Witches of Eastwick and all the sick behaviour you can stomach.
The volume has a foreword by Joe Hill explaining ‘what he meant to say and why he said it’, along with literally dozens of bonus illustrations, covers, and so on.
Image Comics, Joe Hill’s Rain HC, $21.99 for 156 pages. Teen +, horror
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