Last week, Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino’s “Gideon Falls” wrapped up the ‘Pentoculus’ arc with a finale that could only ever unfold in the pages of a comic book. Since its beginning, the series has used unconventional storytelling tools to explore the Smiling Man and his effect on Gideon Falls, but this latest arc takes it to a whole new level. Be warned, major spoilers to follow.
Written by Jeff Lemire
Illustrated by Andrea Sorrentino
Colored by Dave Stewart
Lettered by Steve WandsThe smash-hit horror series continues! After the time- and space-shifting journey of the last arc, Norton and Clara are trapped in small-town Gideon Falls with a murderous psychopath. Meanwhile, Angie and Father Fred confront the Bishop in big-city Gideon Falls, where the secrets of the Pentoculus Machine are revealed in all their mind-twisting glory. In the midst of the chaos, what will happen when the Ploughmen finally answer the call of duty?
Writer Jeff Lemire has spoken before about his love of the ABC TV series Lost, and its influence on his work. You can see it in “Sweet Tooth,” you can see it in “Black Hammer,” and you can really see it in “Gideon Falls,” especially the latter half of the series.
So, you remember in season five of Lost, after all the time skips in the first half, we settle into a story about a bunch of characters the need to get back to the Island, while another bunch of characters try to blow up “The Swan” DHARMA station, culminating in a flash of white that engulfs everything? That’s what ‘The Pentoculus’ arc of “Gideon Falls” is drawing on. Father Quinn and Dr. Xu are sent on a journey back to the original Gideon Falls, while the Ploughmen try to blow up the Black Barn. Season five is probably my favorite season of Lost, so it didn’t come as much of a surprise that I really enjoyed this arc. And yet, for all the similarities Lost and “Gideon Falls” share, they are wildly different too. It’s all in the telling.
Every medium has its advantages and disadvantages, and the best stories are usually ones that find a way to make the story and the medium support each other. And then there are those that take the story and tell it in a way that only this medium can—the medium becomes so much a part of the story, that to adapt it to another medium, you’d need to substantially reinvent it. That’s the kind of story “Gideon Falls” is and it’s what takes it far beyond its influences.
Andrea Sorrentino’s work on this series continually astounds me. I don’t quite understand how or why it works, but I feel it. I swear, while developing “Gideon Falls,” the creative team must’ve sat down and had a discussion about bodily sensations in reaction to fear—the feeling of your hairs standing up on the back of your neck, of your stomach dropping, of a shadow becoming an entire being in your mind—and how they could portray that in comics form without having to rely on text to make sure the idea comes across clearly.
So let’s look at a moment from issue #17. Danny’s in a diner and he looks over at a bin and gets a feeling—he knows what he needs is inside the bin. Sorrention uses circular panels to break primary panels as a way to focus in on the bin.
By this point in the series, we’ve seen this device a lot. But it’s just a small part of a large motif. Circular panels call also be used to create a ripple on the page, like a stone dropped into a still pond. We’ve also seen this quite a bit in the series. Here’s another moment from issue #17.
In this case, Father Quinn isn’t getting the direct connection that Danny was in his scene. Here the connection is coming in waves.
So what do the panels in this scene from issue #20 mean?
Sorrentino has been gradually building up a visual language for “Gideon Falls,” and it’s in moments like this that it really pays off. It takes a concept that is deliberately meant to be felt more than understood. There is a presence on the page that cannot be effectively displayed in a literal manner without muting what that presence feels like—the unknowable is a part of what is, core to its very being. It creates a moment where we know what we feel very clearly, but we only feel what we know very vaguely.
Continued belowThis culminates in a sequence at the end of issue #21, holding on a simple image.
This only works because Sorrentino’s been laying the groundwork for it since issue #1. Then on top of that you’ve got what Dave Stewart is doing with the coloring (the way he uses red in this series is somehow even more striking than how he uses it in “Hellboy”) and what Steve Wands is doing with the lettering, which blurs the line hard between where Sorrentino’s work ends and Wands’ begins. The way the cockroach-like creatures generate sound that becomes an ocean of black noise, is such an unearthly approach to sound.
The creative team routinely draws attention to the comic language other books try to make invisible. Normally, we forget the panels and we’re just in the story. Here, the panels are the story, and not just in ways that make us think about scene contrasts and juxtapositions. They’re an intruding force, something actively upsetting the flow of the story, attacking it from the gutters into the panels. They are the fabric of this story’s reality, and whenever the fabric of reality is twisted in Gideon Falls, so too are the panels twisted. And when reality’s blasted to shreds, the panels break apart, and the comic is dragged into a gaping black hole by cockroach legs.
Lemire and Sorrentino’s “Gideon Falls” takes full advantage of the comics medium to capture the ineffable. It takes abstract feelings and makes them so tangibly real, and yet it’s difficult to point at any one element and say, “That! That’s what did it.” It’s an examination of how the medium communicates, and it weaponizes it to create a supernatural mystery that’s more than just the weird ideas that populate its pages.
Final verdict: 9 – “Gideon Falls” uses the medium to tell its story as only comics can, resulting in some truly jaw-dropping sequences.
