Review time! with ‘Joe Death and the Graven Image’

“I know the reaper on a first name basis”

Benjamin Schipper is the creator of our latest book, Joe Death and the Graven Image, which is published by Dark Horse. Let’s take a look!

I mentioned yesterday that I’m not clever enough to understand some books sometimes, and now this is the second consecutive comic I’ve read where I feel like that. On the one hand, this is a fairly standard Western-type book with some magical elements thrown in – a bad dude tries to redeem himself a bit by saving a baby after a massacre in an isolated town, but it takes him a while because he originally goes to bring the baby back to appease the spirit of the town, which makes the case that baby would have no one to care for it so why not finish the job of killing everyone in the town so the spirit of the town can be free. (I … think?) So Joe, our hero, heads on out, with only his faithful … insect? … companion, Bloo, with him (it’s extremely unclear what Bloo is – or if that’s even his name, but he apparently lives inside Joe). Joe comes across many malevolent beings, gets the baby, takes a boy into his care, and realizes it’s probably not the best thing to give the baby back to the spirit and its ally. As I said, straightforward. Schipper is toying with themes of money being evil and people finding their own path and staying true to yourself, but nothing too hard to puzzle out. The book ends on a cliffhanger, but Schipper does write in the back that he is planning more of Joe’s story, so there’s that.

It’s all very easy to digest … however, things aren’t that simple, are they? This is where I lose things a bit, and the book distances itself from me, so I can’t love it completely. The characters often speak in a very ornate style, very formalistically and even formulaically, and it can be a bit odd and a bit of a slog to get through. Schipper often piles prepositional phrases onto prepositional phrases to make the sentences winding and oblique, and he often inverts sentence structure to bury the nominative somewhere deep inside the phrase. It’s actually weirdly beautiful, but it also is a bit cold and off-putting, so that it makes the structure of the book feel less organic. Joe’s nature is another bothersome thing, as we get some flashbacks to his past, when he was something quite different, but it’s unclear what he was or what he has become. Unless I’m just missing it because of the baroque language? The creature that massacres the town seems to be important early on, but not so much at the end, and there’s not a good explanation about it, while similarly, the boy who comes into Joe’s care seems to be important when he’s introduced, but he’s introduced in such an odd fashion that it’s hard to figure out why he’s important. Finally, Bloo is also never really explained. What’s his deal? Why does he live inside Joe? The book is made up of a lot of vignettes that eventually cohere, but not as well as Schipper probably would like. It is, in other words, a disjointed telling, despite the overall plot being easy to parse. It makes it a frustrating reading experience, even if individual moments can be very gripping. It just lurches a bit too much.

Schipper’s art contributes to this odd feeling, not because it’s bad, but because it can also be quite ornate. He has a fluid, even cartoony style in many ways, most notably with the “comic relief” of the insects and the other small creatures that Bloo hangs out with, who feel like they stepped out of a Walt Kelly comic strip (this is not necessarily a bad thing). When I was reading this, I kept thinking it was like a more cartoony Mike Mignola, and there’s some elements of that – a rigid simplicity in linework but an attention to detail in that line use so that the world and characters are richly realized, a heavy use of blacks, and an oddly baroque aesthetic – but Schipper’s lines are curvier than Mignola’s, so the comparison does break down a bit. His world-building is amazing – the desert is fierce and stark, while the towns are rough and Victorian – and his many characters are unusual and unique. They range from goofy yet humanistic – the small creatures look the most cartoony, but their large eyes express more emotions than the “big” people – to almost ridiculously evil. His dark, malevolent creatures emerge from the shadows, draped in shadows themselves, but they find in Joe and Bloo characters struggling with darkness themselves but who are more than willing to stand guard against the destroyers of light. Schipper uses some very clever but odd perspectives to bring the big world of Joe and the small world of Bloo together, and he uses negative space sparingly but very effectively. It’s a strangely beautiful book, and it does actually help the convoluted storytelling go down a bit easier … not as much as I’d like, but still better than if it had been itself more straightforward.

As I noted, I’m a bit torn about this book. I recognize that there’s quite a bit to like about it, but I feel that Schipper leaves some crucial things too opaque, which makes it harder to enjoy. Unless, of course, I’m just dense. That could be it. But you’ll have to take the word of a dense man, I suppose – this is often a fascinating comic that is ultimately a bit of a let-down. I am interested in Schipper’s work, though, because it’s clear he has talent, so I’ll have to keep an eye out for his stuff. So that’s a good thing!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆