Only one thing I’ve read that stuck in my head, this last week, although I’m reading “The Black Swan” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, so one day eventually I’m sure I’ll talk about that.
But no, this week, it’s all about enigmatic pseudo-zombie survival-horror.
Crossed by Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows
It’s tough to say much about “Crossed”, yet, having only read the first issue, but I have to say, I already kind of love it.
Set after an as yet ambiguous sort of apocalypse, it’s the story of a handful of survivors trying to evade the homicidal hordes of creepy-as-fuck gleeful monsters – who look just like normal people, but for the burned/scarred cross on their faces, which makes them look for all the world like England football fans.
Ennis has never been one for flinching from potentially gruesome or controversial subject matter, and Burrows – well, Burrows has worked for Avatar for years, most famously with Warren Ellis on various projects, so he’s used to drawing transgressive images. But both outdo themselves with this book, letting loose with scenes reminiscent of those in Ellis’ book “Black Gas”, but here drawn in clear, unstylised and crisp nastiness.
Actually, to call this a “zombie” book at all is a bit misleading, as it is with “Black Gas”. The altered humans in each book aren’t undead by any stretch of the imagination, and each still clearly has a personality, albeit one devoid of anything but cruelty. What makes me refer to them as “zombie” books is the mechanistic nature in which these monsters behave, in each case with only one apparent driver.
Ennis is a good writer, but I’m surprised that his outing on this well-worn track is so much more consistent and capable than Ellis’ take on it – I would have thought this was more the latter’s field. But what was really a pleasant shock was that I have never seen Burrows work looking as good as this. That he can draw excess is no real news, but that he can make such a pretty looking book out of it is incredible.
Every now and then you’ll see a serviceable artist just make a quantum leap in quality, and this is the site of Burrows’ jump.
I think the real strength of this first issue is that Ennis seems really engaged with the characters of the survivors, and getting to listen in on them as we are introduced to this fucked-up world is really what makes the book stay in your head. Ennis has always had a talent for making the reader care about the oddest characters, with some deep seam of authenticity and seeming effortlessness inhabiting his writing, and our involvement with these characters, more than the explicitness of the violence, is what I sense is going to bring in the horror later on.
As such, that makes it a bit of a novelty in my experience of horror at Avatar, and I’m looking forward to more!
