Dept-H-18-Featured-Image Reviews 

“Dept. H” #18

By | September 21st, 2017
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

Existential dread is on the menu this week. Whether confronting us with horrors of humanity or horrors of the deep, Matt Kindt makes certain this series stays as gripping as ever.

Cover by Matt Kindt
Dept. H #18
Written & Illustrated by Matt Kindt
Colored by Sharlene Kindt
Lettered by Marie Enger

The mystery of who killed Mia’s father might have just become moot as the team faces a death sentence from an unlikely source. The very people they are fighting to save may end up sentencing them to death.

Even without hearing Hari’s prophetic, seemingly last words in “Dept. H” #18, even without noticing that the depth gauge running up the outer edge on nearly every page of the series has crept well past the two-thirds marker, even without the haunting opening panels of a child climbing out from a fenced-off pit of grey, decaying bodies to let the real world toll of the H-virus really sink in, it sure feels like the hammer of finality is just waiting to bear down on Matt and Sharlene Kindt’s underwater opus.

“Endings are what makes us human,” Hari tells Aaron right before sealing off the bulkhead to his quarters one last time. “Endings are what gives life meaning. What cames after…? We will either find out… or we won’t.” It feels like we’re into the final act now, and this is Kindt’s way of hinting to us that any answers forthcoming will still be elusive.

A great deal of this issue is spent with either Aaron adrift in his dive suit, or the remnants of the Dept. H research team crammed into the tight cockpit of a failing submersible vehicle, drawn against a stark black background. For a series that spent so much time letting it’s claustrophobic, pressure-cooker tendencies pay off, it seems the atmosphere is being subtley tilted the other way. Kindt’s positioning and sense of scale within his panels emphasize just how alone one man can be and how miniscule one life raft can seem against the almost-infinite black and crushing depth felt at the bottom of the world.

“I fear the infinite,” Hari admits to Aaron, in his last contribution to the ongoing dialectic between science and religion that characterized their relationship. “I fear the idea of the abyss.” And in Kindt’s hands, that abyss is genuinely terrifying.

As the life raft races to surface, Kindt switches from the horizontal and square panels that compose the bulk of “Dept. H” #18 to long, vertical panels running the full extent of the page. Within these panels, tentacles — otherworldly in their sinewed texture — rise up from the bottom to grab the vessel at the top. The way Kindt stretches out the image gives an impression of the extreme depths from which these tentacles are reaching. And even more, if the tentacles are that long, then how ungodly big is the leviathan they’re attached to. By placing this emphasis on the vertical rise of the panel, and the action itself, there’s a certain inescapable quality to the dread rising up from the deep.

In much the same way that we never see the gunmen pulling triggers on the fatal shots fired at the plague-ridden masses clamouring for escape on the opening page – though we can very well infer who took those shots – we never actually see the great beast resting on the sea bed, even though we know damn well that it’s there. It’s an impressive bit of restraint, considering how unsettling Kindt’s creature design has been over the run. But by not showing what lurks below, the tension that drives the latter half of the issue compliments Hari’s comments on fear. And his words basically break down to a fear of the unknowable, which is universal enough to be compelling, but is considerably illuminating given what we’ve come to believe about Hari.

Speaking of restraint, “Dept H” #18 is fairly simple compositionally. There’s one panel where multiple instances of Hari and Aaron are shown to wander around a out cross-section of the research base. But those full-page flourishes that flared up across the previous arc are non-existent this round. Then again, there not really needed right now, either. In the context of the series, this might be the most straight-forward issue narratively. And given that, it seems that a free-flowing, design-centric, esoteric-in-execution layout would be out of place. Or it might just be that Kindt wants the weight of Hari’s words to sink in without needless distraction.

Continued below

As always, Sharlene Kindt’s color choices are impeccable and often open to interpretation. There’s a pale, rosey tinge in that child’s eye as he climbs from the pit of corpses on that first page. Is it the disease? Is it the trauma? The very fact that Kindt can feather in those shades of grey when working with her watercolor washes helps to elevate the unease hanging in the slowly depleting air.

“Dept. H #18” won’t go down as the most revelatory or groundbreaking of the series, but it might just be the most efficient. Between the fate of the surface world, the fate of Hari, and the fate of Mia and the research team, there’s something inescapable out there. And it’s something that we might not ever truly know.

Final Verdict: 8.0 – Quite probably the easiest issue to read; quite possibly the most unsettling.


Kent Falkenberg

By day, a mild mannered technical writer in Canada. By night, a milder-mannered husband and father of two. By later that night, asleep - because all that's exhausting - dreaming of a comic stack I should have read and the hockey game I shouldn't have watched.

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