Jul
22
2016
0

Black Road #4 Review

Written by: Brian Wood

Art by: Garry Brown

Publisher: Image Comics

After reading tons of terrible DC comics, it’s nice to see a writer who knows how to handle character backstory and exposition. After reading tons of terrible DC comics, it’s nice to see a writer who knows how to handle dark and edgy without coming off like a cartoon. After reading tons of terrible DC comics, damn is it nice to see an artist who can pen a battle sequence and not make it overtly flashy and annoying while still getting its gravity across.

Black Road #4 skips over the cliffhanger of last issue and sees our heroes still wandering the dangerous road that gives the comic its name. Both characters are injured and might die from exposure, and there’s little happiness to be found. That’s the norm though.

What this issue does is give us backstory. We spend the first handful of pages visiting Julia as a child and slave, and then we spend some of the later issue on Magnus and his brief moments of being married. It’s all good stuff and handled with a light touch, also known as, “the right way to do it.”

Honestly, the rest of this review might as well be a strict copy/paste from my review of Issue #3. Black Road excels at exactly what it wants to excel at, giving us a harrowing story that’s told mostly through silence and minor amounts of narration from Magnus. There are more panels without text than with, which is a lesson more comic book authors should take. You don’t need word vomit to explain what’s going on; you can let the artwork do that for you.

And of course, artistically this comic is fantastic. I love the use of shadows and bright colors, of facial expressions that say so much, and of smothering presence of white snow. White is good, clean, but here it’s cold and dangerous.

Black Road is a fantastic comic that hasn’t quite gripped me like it should, yet I’m glad I get to read it anyways. There’s something just so amazing about its execution that I need to keep coming back. Plus, it makes all of those DC Rebirth issues look pretty bad (not that the bar was set all that high there).