The final issue of the “Black Hammer: Visions” anthology series picks an unlikely character to explore, but it pays off, showcasing the strongest elements of the ‘Visions’ stories.
Created by Jeff Lemire and Dean Ormston
Written by Scott Snyder
Illustrated by David Rubín
Flats by Xulia PisónIn this dueling narrative of two different sins over time, we witness an 1880s origin story of the Black Hammer cult cowboy known as the Horseless Rider and a 1950s southwestern rest home where the staff is immoral and vengeance is waiting in the shadows.
The first half of the “Black Hammer: Visions” anthology explored characters we were familiar with—the heroes that had been stranded in Rockwood after their confrontation with Anti-God. The second half, however, took a turn to supporting characters, gradually getting more and more distant from that core cast. First Skulldigger (but he had his own series, so this wasn’t much of a stretch for readers), then Cthu-Lou (straying into the distant supporting cast now), then Ms. Moonbeam (a character so distant from our main characters she’s stuck in Limbo Land, trying to find a way into continuity), and then finally the Horseless Rider, a character whose appearances in the comics to date have been so slight that many readers probably wouldn’t even remember that they’d seen him.
The Horseless Rider first showed up in the sketchbook section of “Black Hammer – Volume 1: Secret Origins” as part of Jeff Lemire’s 2008 pitch documents to Dark Horse.
This description from the pitch document was copied almost verbatim for 2019’s “The World of Black Hammer Encyclopedia,” which makes sense given how little he’s appeared in the comics over the years. The next time the Horseless Rider showed up he was lying unconscious on the cover of “Sherlock Frankenstein and the Legion of Evil” and he even appeared in the interiors for one panel, but you could only see his back.
He appeared in a handful of panels in “Doctor Andromeda and the Kingdom of Lost Tomorrows,” and he actually had two lines of dialogue this time.
And then finally he showed up in two panels in “Black Hammer ’45,” though no dialogue this time. In all his appearances, he wasn’t really a character, but more a part of the setting—there wasn’t anything particular about him that was crying out for his story to be told (which makes sense, considering he’s an homage to DC’s Phantom Stranger, a character that we know surprisingly little about).
So when Scott Snyder and David Rubín decided to take on the character, they had an almost blank slate to start from. They could have taken those few short paragraphs from “The World of Black Hammer Encyclopedia” and extrapolated from there, but instead they flipped all that on its head. Jacob Tex, the murderer and cheat who got himself killed in a drunken saloon brawl, is not the Horseless Rider that we’ve met in “Sherlock Frankenstein,” “Doctor Andromeda,” and “Black Hammer ’45.” Our Horseless Rider is a different guy with an entirely different story, casting what little we know about the character in a different light.
The story for ‘Visions’ #8 is split into two parallel narratives, with one set in a nursing home in 1955 and the other set in the Wild West a little while after the Civil War. Bridging the two is a letter, used to juxtapose the events of the past against the events in ’55. So when the letter says, “I am not a good man,” the reader associates it with two characters in different timelines simultaneously. This establishes the structure that makes ‘Visions’ #8 tick—nothing ever happens in one narrative without it in some way commenting on the other, moving both forward in tandem. It also means Snyder and Rubín are being economical with their storytelling, getting the most out of the few pages a one-shot affords.
Continued belowAs is usual for any story drawn by Rubín, the page layouts are an absolute pleasure. He uses a pair of double-page sequences to introduce both narratives, and in the process creates as much contrast as possible. The Wild West narrative is bathed in oranges and reds, with overlapping panels and bold sound effects.
Meanwhile, the nursing home narrative is grays and browns, fairly flat layouts with lots of horizontal lines, and more mundane sound effects—and yet just outside the windows, orange looms.
As the two narratives start to overlap, more and more of the Wild West colors bleed into the nursing home sequences, and the layouts become more dramatic.
But it’s the supernatural sequences where Rubín truly shines. When the Western takes a turn for the supernatural, it retains the orange and reds introduced as the core identity of this narrative, but pushes them with light blooms—sort of replicating the cheesecloth-on-the-lens effect films used to use to make scenes take on a surreal quality. The reds become so vivid, the lines on the page can no longer contain them.
I’m going to drop a spoiler warning here. There’s simply no way to talk about the writing of this issue without at least some spoilers, but since I want to talk about how the ending frames everything, I’ll be going into deep spoiler territory.
Before ‘Visions’ #8, we didn’t know much about the Horseless Rider, nor did we really have a need to know anything. By the end of the issue we finally have an understanding of who this guy is, but on top of that there’s now a gnawing need to know more. And this is where the issue really shines, because there is more. Yeah, there’s the nursing home and Wild West narratives, but there’s also the narrative the letter implies. It was sent to Buck before his father became the Horseless Rider, so it’s filled with promises of being a better man, who’s going to settle down with his family, set for life with the mysterious riches he’s found.
But he didn’t come home. So Buck would have grown up without his father, always wondering what happened to him, with only the clues in his letter to lead him toward the truth. And clearly that’s something he pursued and eventually learnt the truth since the box that contains his father’s letter also contains an image of the Horseless Rider. And given his lack of surprise at Eppley’s fate, he’s seen this sort of thing before. Buck doesn’t see his father during this final sequence—at no point does he acknowledge the Horseless Rider in the room—but he certainly understands he’s there. It seems that for much of his life, he has known his father is always watching over him.
And then there’s Jacob Tex, who makes an appearance in this story as a skeleton in a gold coffin. . . at least, I think that’s Tex. I mean, the bullet hole in his head certainly seems to imply murder, which fits with the entry in “The World of Black Hammer Encyclopedia” that had him murdered in a saloon. And here, yet again, I wonder what events led from his murder to his skeleton being taken to the middle of nowhere to be buried. It certainly seems that someone had found a way to disable the spirit of the Horseless Rider to the point that Tex was just a skeleton in a coffin—someone who I assume was trying to escape the Horseless Rider’s vengeance. And then Buck’s father came along and got the curse stuck on him, becoming the second Horseless Rider.
But was he the second? When Buck’s father becomes the Horseless Rider, the ghost girl mentions predecessors, meaning this is a curse that has been passed down more than once. There were other saviors of the dishonored dead before Tex. How far back does this curse go?
More importantly, if the curse can be passed on, it makes it all the more meaningful that Buck’s father is still the Horseless Rider in 1955. Is this due to lack of opportunity to pass the curse on? Or is this so he can stay watching over his son?
Continued belowSnyder writes Buck’s father as a morally complex person. He’s not good, but he’s not entirely bad either. You can imagine how this man could become someone who takes on a role beyond just the one he’s cursed with. He becomes a man that’s seen as a hero in Spiral City (an unconventional one, yes, but a hero nonetheless). He chooses to go to Europe and fight in World War II. That’s not his curse—that’s his choice.
“Black Hammer: Visions” #8 not only creates a strong one-shot story, it suggests a whole lot more in the process. Suddenly the character we didn’t need to know about, has a bunch of stories to tell. Will we ever get to them? Perhaps. Or maybe this is it. If they wanted, the creative team could dig deeper and deeper into the lore of this curse and the people it claims, but what really gets me here is the way when you think about it a little deeper, it says more about the relationship between father and son, which is far more rewarding than the lore could ever be.
Final verdict: 9 – Snyder and Rubín are well matched here. The story on the surface absolutely works and is satisfying on its own, but they both scattered details in their work that prompt questions, making for a reread that’s richer than the first.
