Black Stars Above #2 Featured Reviews 

“Black Stars Above” #2

By | December 20th, 2019
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

“Black Stars Above” #2 throws Eulalie into the deep end and onto a mysterious path. Along the way, she sates her curiosity, passes out of the bounds of reality and meets some very strange creatures. Warning: spoilers ahead.

Cover by Jenna Cha
Written by Lonnie Nadler
Illustrated by Jenna Cha
Colored by Brad Simpson
Lettered by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
The storm continues to gestate. Lost in a wilderness known as The Green Ribbon, Eulalie is faced with an impossible decision: return home to a family that has forsaken her, or finish her journey to the northern town to deliver the mysterious package. She must decide wisely, for threats lurk behind every tree and the snow has an appetite of its own.

“Black Stars Above” is a different kind of horror tale. The book blends the bleak expanse of 19th-century America and its politics with absurd horrors big and small. It’s a bit sci-fi, a bit eldritch and a bit Red Dead Redemption 2. The pace of this book isn’t going to be for everyone, but Nadler and Cha know the score and help us over this hurdle by crafting a protagonist with whom we can empathize. Eulalie’s trapped on a number of levels and now apparently doomed to a circuitous, abstract and strangely sinister journey through the wastelands toward … something.

The main issue in “Black Stars Above” is the occasional breakdown in how the narration and art flow together. They’re meant to complement each other, and the art does occasionally rub up against the narrator’s epistolary control in a pleasant way. The steady flow of script provides a false sense of security while we peek through a narrow window into the strange goings on of a winter rife with weird creatures – both of this plane, and of elsewhere. These moments are mostly intentional, but there are a few times when the simplicity of the page gets bogged down in circuitous prose. In issue #2, a good example of this is the 9-panel page depicting the river full of dead fish. The visuals here are disturbing – the oily black water butting against the beaver dam, the grim bodies of the fish juxtaposed with the almost cheerful red of the box – and the page functions well without a stitch of dialogue. However, the narration covers how the world is unknowable and gets a bit too abstract to complement the action on the page. It distracts instead of amplifying, and dialing that element back would let the tension of Eulalie’s soon-to-be-fateful choice resonate on the next page.

Pushing a comics experience toward the line of illustrated narrative is risky, and “Black Stars Above” flirts with this hazard more than once. Still, the book’s compelling in its boldness and its ability to dictate its pace. My favorite kinds of horror feel inevitable, and the mounting pressure on Eulalie to navigate the Green Ribbon is effective. Cha helps unspool the weirdness with some well-crafted pages. There are a few 9-panel grids that work well – one featuring a single image split into 3 panels that’s well-crafted and balanced – and one three-panel page in particular that’s a beautiful held breath before the proverbial night falls. Cha struggles a bit with dynamic action at times, and there are several instances where Eulalie’s facial expressions cross the line from grotesque to comical. Where Cha excels is in the background details, and “Black Stars Above” pays a lot of attention to its backgrounds. The forest, river and endless snows in between are peppered with the right kind of sparse, often dead, foliage. On one later page, the gnarled roots of a tree appear to blossom and pulse as the dialogue from the creature crackles in from the bottom right. Cha lets the moment linger for two panels, and the page turn drops us into a claustrophobic nighttime snowscape on a precise beat.

Simpson goes for a very subdued, natural color palette. It’s hard to generate interest in a book that takes place in the dead of winter, but Simpson does so with sickly greys, blues, greens and browns to carry the thin, cruel beauty of snow-drenched landscapes. The pearly white of the creature is perfect, accented as it is with dead grey and black, and that innocuous, cheerful red box is the perfect accent to the blasted, strange landscape. Additionally, Simpson complements Cha’s scratchy shading well so the colors feel organic, and the art a cohesive whole.

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Otsmane-Elhaou situates hefty narration and dialogue well. Cha leaves a lot of space to work with but there’s a lot to place on the page. The spoken font is a nice scratchy contrast to Eulalie’s controlled script, and the square balloons are a regimented choice with an unsteady stroke to blend with the art. The tails are uniform and the contrast between the body of the balloon and the regular tail is a bit strange, but it’s a minor detail that doesn’t detract from the overall effect. The biggest issue is Eulalie’s narration – while the font choice is readable, it’s quite small, and digital readers might have to zoom in a bit. “Black Stars Above” is a book worth reading on paper, both in its aesthetic and its content.

Overall, “Black Stars Above” #2 skates a fine line between clutter and balance, but it succeeds because it takes chances and refuses to compromise in its vision. The concept is good, it’s executed pretty well and, above all, it’s authentically weird. Horror takes what we know and skews it for effect or introduces something so alien and intolerable as to shock the system. “Black Stars Above” is doing both at once, and entertaining us as it reaches for its goal.

Final Verdict: 8.0 – “Black Stars Above” #2 plunges Eulalie into peril with effective, tense storytelling.


Christa Harader

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