Comic Review: Deathbed #5

Deathbed #5

Vertigo

Writer: Joshua Williamson

Artists: Riley Rossmo and Ivan Plascencia

All right, let’s see if this is an issue of Deathbed.

New, vibrant location? Check.

The same scintillating, brass-band main characters? Check.

Heartfelt character exploration? Check.

A whole lot of energetic adventure? Double check.

It’s Deathbed all right.

My very first review for this site was Deathbed, and it is my distinct pleasure and honor to bring you another review of this absolutely top-tier Vertigo series. God, what a ride! This might be my favorite issue yet. Deathbed is, if you’re unaware, a bloody carnival ride through the life and mistakes of Antonio Luna. And this issue is exhilarating.

Beginning with the art, it’s Rossmo and Plascencia at their absolute best with some of the most beautiful and dynamic pages I’ve seen in months. Do you want proof? Just look at the spread on page 2! The page is a wonderful demonstration of how selective motion blur can create a powerful sense of force and speed, and then the imaginative layout of the inset panels catches the eye at the top right of the page and gently guides it back down to the lower left without you even noticing. The flow of the page is incredibly seamless despite its unorthodox-looking construction, and indeed it is that unusual layout that makes it so pleasing to the eye. There are other pages that impress me in this issue, but this one especially makes my heart go pit-a-pat. But there’s something about the art in this issue that’s very special, and it’s something I’d like to draw your attention to: the resting energy. The heartbeat, if you will. As in any good comic, not every page is jam-packed with action – you’ve got to have some time when it’s just characters talking. And those pages, done by almost any artist, are bound to be much less visually interesting. But Rossmo and Plascencia manage to keep those pages imbued with more than enough visual power and intensity to keep the feeling of action sticking around until the next real action begins. It’s a hell of a magic trick. So how do they pull it off? Well, a lot of it is due to the colors. As I’ve mentioned before, Plascencia’s unusual palette choices really leap off the page. In the previous issue, the setting was defined by lovely blues offset with oranges and yellows hidden away in parts of the panel. In this issue, the greens and browns of the island setting are not offset by anything in the background but rather by Luna himself – his black coat has large patches of mustard yellow on it, and his presence in nearly every panel ensures that the contrast necessary for visual interest is constantly maintained even though the background is quite consistent the entire issue. Meanwhile, Valentine Richards has purple pants, lavender hair, and a white shirt, therefore also standing out from the surroundings. It’s a very, very smart move on the colorist’s part. Rossmo, on the other hand, fulfills his side of the bargain by making sure that every single panel is totally different from the one before it and the one after it. He deftly switches between different levels of zoom and different angles and uses perspective to wonderful effect by avoiding placing his protagonists in the foreground of an image, or if one is in the foreground then the other never is. In short, Rossmo understands that comics must be a visually dynamic art form and he creates incredibly visual comics. Suffice it to say that I loved the art.

So how do I like the story? Well, its pace is wonderful throughout. The conversations and the personal background don’t go so slowly that they slow down the pace of the story and not so quickly that there’s a lot of extra air between big events. I think that for a story as character-driven and action-driven as this one, a balance like this is hard to strike. And they manage it beautifully. The flow of the story is essentially going from Big Event (partially emotional) to Introspective Conversation to Big Event and back again, each Big Event continuing the introspection from before and flowing perfectly into the introspection that follows. It’s fun. It’s just plain fun. And more than that, it’s meaningful fun that actively explores an interesting character’s past and present! The cliffhanger is excellent, too. This is the best issue of a series that already had me hooked, and I couldn’t be more excited for next issue’s finale.