Undone by Blood #5
Writers: Zac Thompson and Lonnie Nadler, Artist: Sami Kivela, Colorist: Jason Wordie, Letterer: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, Publisher: AfterShock
I call it the Knives Out effect. Sometimes a piece of media is so beloved by those who have consumed it, that when they hear someone else has experienced it, their voice takes on a breathless quality, their eyes a dreamy, middle-distance stare, and all they can say is, “So good.”
Knives Out certainly didn’t invent this, but it’s a prominent recent example.
Another example, for me at least, has been Undone by Blood, or the Shadow of a Wanted Man, a ’70s revenge Western out of AfterShock Comics, about a young woman seeking to avenge the brutal murder of her family in small-town Arizona, and the Western pulp hero whose adventures she uses as a playbook.
Let me get straight to the point: This story sticks the landing, and it may be my favorite story from many of the creators involved, and the publisher that put it out.
Revenge is messy business, and Ethel Grady Lane is a messy hero. She conflates names, picks fights she can’t handle and gets hurt over and over again.
That’s not an insult to the protagonist, and it’s absolutely a compliment to the story. She’s 19 years old, in over her head and blinded by anger. People like that make mistakes. Hell, it should be all they do.
But she’s not incompetent, she’s not helpless and she’s not to be pitied. Because, like a bug-riddled Terminator, Ethel keeps getting back up, recalculating after each error. There’s not room for an infrared heads-up display in this book, but she might as well have one.
Another point in this book’s favor: While Undone by Blood pays homage to the revenge films of the ’70s, it does this almost entirely without the threat of sexual violence. Ethel doesn’t even pause midway through the story to get her rocks off with some passing strange. (Though we thought we were close to it with the pool girl in issue #2.) No, nothing distracts Ethel from the hot, nasty climax of revenge.
With their dual narrative, writers Zac Thompson and Lonnie Nadler continue to prove themselves a formidable duo, even as they shine on separate efforts like No One’s Rose (in Thompson’s case) and Black Stars Above (in Nadler’s). The farther they branch out from their horror roots and their Marvel work, the more we see just how wide their range is.
Artists Sami Kivela and Jason Wordie know how to make each other sing, a duet they previously practiced in 2018’s Abbott. Their art is detailed, dusty and bloody.
Wordie’s red touches, soaks and seeps into everything. It hangs in twilight skies, wafts in streaks of Cheeto dust, pools on the ground as characters breathe their last. Sometimes it hides itself in oranges and pinks and purples, but all those colors are just red getting into other stuff, like a stain you can’t wipe out.
And Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou could letter a comic entirely in Zapf Dingbats and make it look good. In fact, I dare him to. The way he uses different balloons, boxes and fonts for the present and for flashbacks and for the Solomon Eaton passages, everything is a carefully considered choice, working in harmony with the rest of the art team. He even does that thing I love of word balloons being tucked behind scenery and grayed out to confer that voices are whispering in the distance and only half being paid attention to.
Gun to my head, if I had to pick a nit, I’d wish Ethel’s dad hadn’t looked so similar to one of the bad guys who’d helped kill him. It’s the kind of thing where a race swap here or there would have helped diversify the cast. But let’s not muddy the message: This book slaps.
If you’re parsing this review to learn the fates of Ethel or her personal Saint of Killers, Solomon Eaton, you’ve come to the wrong place. That said, you’re likely reading this a day after the news broke that the whole gang is getting back together for a sequel series next year: Undone by Blood, or the Other Side of Eden, which continues Solomon’s story but moves the other half of the book to the Great Depression to tell the story of an immigrant in Texas who’s got his own reasons to set things to rights by violence.
Can’t wait.
So good.
Dan Grote is the editor-in-chief of ComicsXF, having won the site by ritual combat. By day, he’s a newspaper editor, and by night, he’s … also an editor. He co-hosts The ComicsXF Interview Podcast with Matt Lazorwitz. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two kids and two miniature dachshunds, and his third, fictional son, Peter Winston Wisdom.
