Broken Frontier

Simultaneously around the world, a disease that inflicts a cross shaped sore on the faces of the infected is spread about the entire population. The sick turn to murderous actions that of course leads to the contagion spreading. And this is only the beginning...

Last we saw Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows together they had teamed up the Antichrist and Jesus as drinking buddies. Their heretical adventures are sure to have reserved quite a few of us into at least the second circle of Dante’s Inferno. This time they tackle full on horror. Oh, they’ve covered the horrific before, but it was more of an ends to a mean as opposed to the milieu of the book. This book is clearly about apocalyptic monsters of some sort, they don’t quite seem to be zombies. Funny that after writing about the Antichrist, the creators should choose to take on Armageddon.

Of course, there will be religious overtones to the piece, the end of this book makes that clear. In a land deserving of punishment, God must be the vengeful disciplinarian. There is a certain amount of that thematic on display here, what with the exposition’s strong overtone of the current desensitized state of humanity. This kind of subtext is what makes the best horror work and the scariest horror films play on the religious beliefs of the audience. Movies like The Exorcist and The Omen amplify the tension by playing on the archetypes of doom found in the Judeo-Christian world. Ennis is never one for that kind of subtlety and makes his intentions known with the usual "what kind of God?" talk and well, the all too obvious symbol on the faces of the sick.

The concept is high and fitting for the creative team. It is a neat take on what seems to be the zombipocalypse (still using the word, Webster take note). Leave it to Ennis to find a new way to do the overdone tale. The writing here leaves a little to be desired. The opening pages feature a clunky sentence structure that can confuse readers as to who the narrator is. The narration is also told in the past tense, but it is the end of the book that gives you an idea of how near the future portrayed here is and the seeming archaic nature of Youtube seems to be a little overdone. This is a forgivable sin though as it seems that quite a bit may have occurred in the time between the events of this book and what appears to be the setting of the rest of the series.

Burrows’ art is phenomenal as always. It is probably hard to get a guy willing to risk almost certain air conditionless eternity by drawing the things that Ennis thinks up. It may be that they have effectively defined their possibilities in the after life that keeps them working together. They are a good team that work well together and understands when too much is too much. The readers should be thankful, because the way the knifing turns out is almost certainly something none of us wanted to see. Or maybe they don’t understand, as that scene is a colorless shape sketch that inexplicably stands out from the rest of the comic like maybe at the last second an editor had second thoughts.

Ennis keeps pushing the limits of what is acceptable in comics. We should probably be thankful that he never worked for Bill Gaines, because if he had, we probably wouldn’t have a medium to devote numerous websites and message boards to. Comics probably would have gone the way of the dinosaur. Lets hope God has a sense of humor if he does exist, if not we are all in a lot of trouble for letting Ennis write his works. Probably more so for buying them.