Reading the runes
Written by Jeff Lemire
Art by Andrea Sorrentino
Colors by Dave Stewart
Letters by Steve Wands
Publisher: Image Comics
Reviewer: Andrew McAvoy
This book is billed as a rural mystery! An urban horror! A character-driven meditation on obsession, mental illness, and faith! It's all these things and more, praise be! Amen.
Well this book was a delight. The tale in this opening issue is split into two distinct parts. The first, the tale of the troubled Norton, who can read the runes in pieces of trash that he collects and forms into an image or a portent that points towards events existing in another sphere. He is being treated for psychiatric illness, and his therapist isn't fond of his collecting habits and what he reads into the assembled pieces. He is warned if he continues that he will have to be incarcerated again, so he deliberately withholds the habit from her.
The other story related to Father Wilfred, who arrives in the back-ass of nowhere, a small town which has recently lost its Priest, in circumstances which no-one is willing to divulge. Which is awkward when his predecessor then appears one night as a spectral vision, who Wilfred follows into the cornfield, a cornfield stained with blood (?) and then finds the parish's greatest old lady volunteer Church warden...dead!! Now we know from the start of the issue that old Wilfred wasn't too keen to be told of this mission - one can imagine that he's even less keen now.
Bits and pieces
Lemire spins an impressive tale and at the end of the book we get a pretty decent nod to the fact that Norton and Wilfred's journeys are conjoined. Sorrentino's art blends well with Lemire's writing and their past work together really allows this book to get off to a flyer. Special mention to Stewart on colors and Wands on Lettering, both of whose work serves to augment the beauty of this first issue. This is a stunning book and if this opener is anything to go by we are in for a pretty special work.
9/10
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