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Green Wake #3

By Dan Horn
June 8, 2011 - 17:53

"You've gotten lost, I'm afraid... You've wound up in a place full of people who have no idea how they got here," self-fashioned private eye Morley Mack uttered, giving the first thin pencil strokes of delineation to the enigmatic town of Green Wake.

Two issues later, readers have been given a peek behind the veil at a world of abstract horror and mystery where people slowly devolve into frogs, generations meld together into the androgyny of timelessness, and no one ever dies, just disappears, until now.

Ariel, a sweet girl by all accounts, has lost her mind, murdering several of Green Wake's residents, and all too coincidentally her former lover, Carl, from before her time in Green Wake, has washed up on the town's endless shores. Altruistic snoop Morley and his hulking partner Krieger take Carl in, but also pique his brain to track Ariel's whereabouts and elucidate her puzzling motives. All the while, Morley has pervasive memories of his pregnant wife, killed in an automobile accident that was perhaps his fault.

In Green Wake #3, the three protagonists follow a lead to the town's abbey, hoping to find Ariel seeking spiritual counsel there. Instead, they catch a glimpse of a horrifying creature and wind of the fact that Ariel has already left the abbey.

Green Wake as a series has been amongst the best comic books I've read all year. As Riley Rossmo conducts a visual orchestra of dark ethereality through digital water-color and ink, Kurtis Wiebe spins an equally murky yarn, whose motifs fall somewhere between Hitchcock's Vertigo and Brockmeier's The Brief History of the Dead. Green Wake is full of dense metaphorical imagery and mystery, yet its theme, love lost, is so universal that accessibility isn't an issue.

This issue is perhaps my least favorite of the series thus far, because I feel as though it divulged a bit too much at too rapid of a pace. Perhaps, this is due to the fact that the series was originally only meant to cover a five-issue span. Now that the series has been green-lit by Image to continue as an on-going, I'm hoping for the attention to detail the first two chapters of Green Wake had to carry over into the rest of the book.

Rating: 8 /10

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12