The Sunken Dead comes to an end in this action-packed issue.
Cover by Dave Palumbo
Written by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden
Illustrated by Patric Reynolds
Colored by Dave Stewart
Lettered by Clem RobinsWhen a Drowning City millionaire’s plan to reunite with his dead family goes terribly wrong, Joe Golem and Simon Church rush to reverse his spell before the city is taken over by drowning victims come back to life.
In my review for the last issue, I mentioned that it had laid the groundwork for an exciting next chapter, and this issue absolutely delivers. This issue is full of all the stuff I thought worked in the last issue, plus some other stuff that I like but can’t really talk about here because, you know, spoilers. But you should know it is good stuff, even if I can’t say what that stuff is.
Like the last issue, this one is focused on Simon Church, exploring who he is, what he’s done to himself, and the nature of his relationship with Joe. We even get a sense of what he might have been like as a younger man. He’s rather fearless—and in the face of zombies no less.
As for Joe himself, he was just there fight zombies. This could’ve easily been a one-note moment, but Golden used the fight as a way to get a better sense of Joe’s character. He’s a guy that prefers things to be straightforward, so having him fight off zombies, impatiently yelling at Church to hurry up made for a fun sequence.
Speaking of zombies, Patric Reynolds did a great job with these guys, especially in the underwater scenes. He was able to do horrifying and vicious, but also desperate and sad.
OK, let’s talk spoilers.
Just like the final issue of the previous arc, my favorite bit of the issue was the melancholy stuff. Bostwick getting scratched by his zombie wife was initially played as something terrible, a man reaping his terrible reward for what he’d done. But after he was scratched, the mood changed. Bostwick wasn’t torn apart by his loved ones as you’d expect; he was reunited with them, just not in the way he’d planned. He couldn’t bring them back, so he had to die. I like to think his wife scratched him deliberately, that this was no mere accident.
The way this switch sequence was handled visually was nicely done. Before the scratch everything is chaotic, but after the scratch all the panels with Bostwick become more peaceful and still until he finally stops moving altogether and falls dead into the waters of the Drowning City.
For a two-issue arc, this story has a long wind down. The zombies are taken care of by the halfway point, yet the story continues on. This could have been a pacing problem, but here it works rather well. It’s a kind of coda—this is wrapping up not just the arc, but the first collection of Joe Golem stories, and so it takes the opportunity to tease the future. Church begins work on more extreme measures in biomechanics magic to keep himself alive, Joe seems to be approaching a breaking point with his golem visions, and a bunch of mysterious figures in gas masks show up, working for a man that apparently made them and is looking for some kind of glass heart. No doubt we’ll learn more about him in future… No doubt. (I’m glaring meaningfully at you, just in case you can’t tell.)
As for Lori, I’m glad she finally did something other than be the obligatory love interest. I still don’t click with her, but it’s early days. We’ll see. She could surprise me in the next arc.
And then there was this issue’s golem vision. We seem to get one of these like clockwork each issue and they take up a lot of page real estate, but they have limited payoff. That said, I didn’t mind this one. The main story was done by the time it came along, so it didn’t feel like an interruption, but rather more like an active development.
Continued belowThough I can’t help feeling this could have been more powerful if the visions in the last arc had been shorter and more vague, so that by the time Joe says his visions are getting worse in this issue we already have a sense of that progression. For Joe the visions might be getting stronger and more intense, but for the reader, they’re basically the same intensity, virtually all four pages long, and all as coherent as the last. Each is simply the next part, no real escalation.
These are minor quibbles though.
End of spoilers.
This issue was a great way to close out the first batch of Joe Golem stories. It struck a nice balance of catering to both readers that have only read the comic and those familiar with the prose novel. Patric Reynolds and Christopher Golden seem to do their best work with sad, haunted characters, and this issue has a great moment for that. I don’t know when the next round of Joe Golem stories will come along, but hopefully it’ll be before the year is done.
Final Verdict: 7.5.
