Broken Frontier

What if you could see death coming?  What if you knew death was coming for someone you loved?  What would you do, what would you risk, what would you sacrifice?

These are the questions posed by the Death Comes to Dillinger collected edition from Silent Devil comics.  Writer James Patrick chooses to set this story in the old west, creating a kind of High Noon riff with metaphysical overtones. 

At the edge of the frontier people have carved out lives for themselves—a small town with stores, a church, a bank, and a jail.  These townspeople are accustomed to those who travel the wide-open spaces—Natives, good guys, bad guys... and Death.  Personified as a skeleton dressed in black western wear including boots, spurs, chaps, and a hat; even a gun belt bearing two six-shooters.  Death is the ultimate villain of any Western.  When death rides into town it means he is there to collect a soul and the people of Dillinger know it. 

As they wonder who he has come to collect one man feels certain he knows.  Paxton’s little daughter is gravely ill and getting worse: confronted with the prospect of losing his child he prepares to make a deal with this devil.  Meanwhile, his wife struggles to find help for both of the people she loves.  The townspeople of Dillinger are afraid of Death, though, and they have long bowed to his inevitability—but is he as invincible as they have come to believe?

In every culture around the world there are myths and folktales about heroic characters beating or cheating a version of death personified.  Patrick uses those stories as a touchstone, merging them with the time-honored tradition of the Western story of an eastern tenderfoot taking on a big, bad gunslinger.  The idea of a battle with Death fits in well with the traditional Western showdown.  This format also helps create more dramatic tension as time runs down to the appointed hour of the meeting.  With only so much time to prepare what can be said?  What can be done?  Paxton and Claire each approach the problem differently but with the same passion. 

There is more terrific, metaphorical imagery used throughout the comic and perhaps the best is the contents of Death’s saddlebags.  In ancient Greek mythology the Fates spun man’s life as a thread and cut it at the appointed hour of each individual’s death.  Here Patrick substitutes pocket watches.  Death’s saddlebag proves to be filled with them, each one bearing a person’s name, each one ticking away until the end.  This image even has a double meaning – representing both the time allotted to each person and also that the ticking of clocks have long been associated with heartbeats – the source of our lives.  When the heart stops so does time for that person.

Of course, this beautiful imagery is provided by the art of Se7enhedd and the colors of J.M. Ringuet.  Together this duo creates something that looks almost like watercolor paintings.  They perfectly convey the dry, dusty landscape and the work-hardened people in it.  To see proof of this, one needs look no further than the character of Claire.  While she has a kind of beauty about her she is not glamorous – spending her time caring for her home and child rather than caring about her looks.  Their design for Death is also suitably creepy—mixing real-word elements with the otherworldliness of a skeleton that walks, talks, drinks, and even handles a gun.

While Death Comes to Dillinger has some elements in common with myths and legends, it goes beyond those morality tales and stories told for entertainment, to reach for greater truths.  How far can love take someone?  Is it strong enough to defeat death itself?  What does it take to survive in a world where death is a constant specter?  These are the questions posed but the answers can only be found in living through them.