It’s been awhile since I checked in with Jonathan Hickman’s East of West. Yep. Things still suck. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean the series sucks – I mean the world Hickman has created. East of West is the dystopian future to end all dystopian futures, and now, amongst all that fell apart to create this horrible world, what’s left is also falling apart. The Message, a religious ideology with disastrous and violent results, is forming into two factions. Those who believe, and those who do not. In the center, a child of an ultimate female warrior and the embodiment of death itself.
Hickman continues the layering of this new world. Death and the two spirits he travels with have set foot into the Dead Country, a place to where those who chose not to believe in The Message were exiled. One of the spirits lives here; his father protects the land while straddling two planes of existence, the living and the dead. Within the Dead Country is The Grave, where The Lady, a mutant oracle of vicious disposition, has told Death he can find his son. Meanwhile, the remaining members of the Four Horsemen are studying Death’s child, a boy who has been living connected to a computer. His only vision is through a helmet, and he is learning to become something else.
The Four Horseman don’t like it, they want the boy slaughtered. Their arrogance has allowed the boy to fool them as he searches for his own way out of his current terror. Deep in Death Country, Death and his cohorts battle a creature that is the living embodiment of the father of one of the spirits. In defeat, he agrees to tell Death where his child is, but not before a sniper takes him out from what seems like half the planet away. What does all this mean? What exactly is going on here? Beats me.
East of West, like most anything Hickman writes, is not something to be experienced issue to issue. Even if you have been following East of West, the likelihood of being able to follow the story is about 50/50. Having read most of what Hickman has written, I’m fairly certain that’s by design. East of West #10 is exciting, visceral, and confusing as all get out. Hickman wants you thinking, he wants you to go back and re-read older issues. There is never an easy way out of a Hickman story.
Nick Dragotta’s art is, as always, awesome. Dragotta has style, a unique way of processing art that allows what he does to be wholly his own. There are elements of other eras in what he does, how the lines come across and the inking, but what Dragotta puts on the page is unlike anything else out there. Visceral, with great use of shadow, movement, and panel positioning. Dragotta clearly has a cinematic eye to how plans each book, and each issue is a different reel to that film.
East of West is a complicated story that forces you to think. It’s also visually stunning.
(4 Story, 4.5 Art)
