“It’s so easy when you know the rules”
James Tynion IV adds to his nascent empire with Exquisite Corpses, a fun 13-issue mini-series that has already spawned one spin-off and is getting at least another, too. 
Tynion writes it, but he co-writes individual issues with Michael Walsh (#2, #7), Pornsak Pichetshote (#3, #8), Che Grayson (#4, #11), Jordie Bellaire (#5, #10), and Tyler Boss (#6, #9). Walsh draws the entire issues #1, 12, and 13, and he draws pages in all the others, along with Marianna Ignazzi (#2, #10), Valentine de Landro (#3, #9), Adam Gorham (#4, #8), Claire Roe (#5, #7), and Gavin Fullerton (#6, #11). Bellaire colors the entire thing, and Becca Carey letters the entire thing, and it’s edited by Steve Foxe, Greg Lockard, and Eric Harburn. I don’t know how much the trades are, but they released, I think, three of them (the first issue is a bit longer than the others, so the trades get broken up a bit more, but it still feels like a cash grab), but to get each issue, it’s going to cost you $64.87 (each issue is $4.99). However, each issue is longer than the usual stuff you get from DC and Marvel, so we get 376 pages of slaughter-y goodness. Issue #1 is 60 pages long, while the final two are 30 and 32 pages, respectively, and the others are either 24 or 26 pages. So it’s a nice chunk of comics for your ducats.
Tynion comes up with a kind of tired plot, but does some fun things with it. The thirteen richest families in 1775 took over running the colonies from Britain (it’s implied that the Revolution was just a lot of sound and fury), and they still run things. Every five years they hold a competition to see who gets to be in charge over the next five years. Said competition takes the form of finding a small town, sealing it off from the rest of the country for one evening, and sending twelve killers (the current ruling family doesn’t get an entrant) into the town to kill each other … and, of course, anyone who happens to be in the way. 
Part of the reason for this, it seems, is because the families make bets with each other about how many people their killers can kill, and part of the reason is because, well, these killers are nuts. As a contrast, one killer is not nuts, and he goes out of his way to not kill civilians and even protect some of them, but for the most part, the people sent into this town are not the most hinged individuals. The civilians are left to survive as best they can, and the families cover it up because they can. It’s a fun set-up, even if it’s not the most original one in the world.
The book works partly because of its length. Tynion has become a hot writer, so while this is from Image and he took on some (most?) of the costs himself (I know a tiny bit about how Image operates, but not enough to be definitive), he’s hawt enough that I imagine this sold well and the extra pages didn’t put too much of a dent in his profit margin (although maybe it did and he just didn’t care, because he’s Tynion the Fourth of His Name, and He Rules All!!!!). So, while we don’t ever get to know too much about the killers (although we do get a little, which is nice), or even the families (nobody uses their real names — they’re just known by the states they represent, and some of them, whose killers get eliminated quickly, are barely in the book at all), we do get a decent amount of time with the townspeople who are trying to survive, and that’s always nice. At the beginning of the book, the sheriff (of Oak Valley, Maine, the town they choose) gets paid off to leave the town forever (I mean, it’s a douchey thing to do, but they do give him ten million dollars), and after that, everyone is on their own — there’s no cell service, no internet, and no way out of town because there are soldiers on the perimeter. They do discover that short-wave radios work, because the “groundskeeper” — the dude in charge of closing the town off — has to be able to communicate with his soldiers and the “gamesmaster” back at the headquarters, where the representatives of the families are gathered. 
This doesn’t help too much, but it is a nice, crucial note at one point. Tynion gives us several interesting characters — Laura, the EMT whose uncle just happens to be the sheriff and who tries to warn her before it happens (which is a no-no, but I guess he manages to get away with it); Mike, the convenience store clerk who does not love that his conspiracy theories about the world largely turn out to be right; Audrey, the harried single mom whose boss at the used car lot is just screaming to be killed horribly (and he is); Jason, Audrey’s son, who ends up hanging out with one of the serial killers without knowing it (the killer happens to be a kid or at least be young enough to pass for one); Xavi and Craig, who sometimes babysit for Jason and end up getting separated during the evening, so Xavi spends a lot of time looking for Craig (they’re a couple). There are some other characters, and Tynion does a good job giving not only the main ones but all of them some good personalities, so when some of them are dispatched (I’m not saying who survives!), it has a good impact because we at least know a little about them. Plus, they’re not just passive victims, especially once they figure out that something very weird is going on. Laura is a tough lady, and Audrey goes Mama Bear to the extreme, and Xavi knows a thing or two about some of the places in town that help him out. The final couple of issues bring this into focus a lot more, as Tynion throws some nice twists at us to bring it all home.
Meanwhile, the jockeying for position among the families is fun. Massachusetts, represented by an older lady who Doesn’t Have Time For This Shit, is the most developed character here, as she brings in one of the more sympathetic killers and figures out ways to thwart New York, who’s a huge douchebag and whom nobody wants to see running things for the next five years. His participant, the Fox Mask Killer, is also a bit sympathetic, as she has a personal connection to South Carolina, whose killer is an actual member of the family (which is allowed in the rules of the game, but is unusual). 
There’s a lot of double-dealing going on, as Massachusetts and South Carolina try to deal with New York, even though he seems to have the upper hand. Tynion makes up interesting rules for the game, which means things get a bit fraught at the end as killers die and the field gets winnowed. Meanwhile, we don’t get a lot about the killers, but we get enough to make them interesting. Some are dispatched easily — the first one goes down at the end of issue #1 — but most take a bit more effort. Tynion and his collaborators try to make them as weird or unique as possible, so we get the religious fanatic, the video game-playing kid, the serial killer in the rabbit mask, the circus dude with the giant hammer, two different pyromaniacs (in slightly different ways), the creepy woman with the wires, the assassin with the fox mask, the blueblood with the crossbow, the evil nurse, the attractive loverboy, and the ex-soldier. As I noted, some get killed pretty quickly, and we don’t learn the identity of some of the others, but for some, we get hints about their tragic backstories, which makes them more interesting than you might expect them to be. As I noted above, because the book is so long, Tynion and the writers have some space to work.
Walsh is a terrific artist, and his work on the book is excellent. He creates a bucolic town and surroundings, dropping holding lines and allowing Bellaire (who is, of course, great) to fill in the colors, and Walsh always uses nice blacks to create a disturbing tone to the book. When we get to the game HQ, he uses sharper lines and keeps more lines, which contrasts nicely with the more languid art of Oak Valley. 
Walsh draws the HQ scenes that bookend the issues, and the other artists that jump in and do a very nice job. We get a nice town, and each artist gets to do some epic death scenes, as killers and townspeople are dispatched with a good deal of brio. The designs for the killers are very fun, as you can see from the covers above, and they all come up with some fun, oddball deaths. In particular, each artist does a very nice job showing Audrey’s increasing desperation over finding her son, and Walsh takes it home really well in issues #12 and 13. The art on all the issues is quite good, and it’s nice that Tynion was able to get them all for the series.
Exquisite Corpses (I don’t really get the title of the book, but whatever) is a very keen series, and I imagine Image will have a very nice hardcover coming out in the future, which would be a nice book to get. I’m not terribly interested in the killers’ spin-off books, because I do like that we don’t know much about them, but if you want to read them, that’s your prerogative! I think the main series is enough, and it’s quite a good comic. Check it out!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
