Broken Frontier

Julie goes hunting for answers, as does Dillon. This brings them to their very first meeting.

There have been grumblings that this book is moving a little too slow. That there isn’t much happening. I know. I know. It’s weird. What more could a reader want than a beautifully illustrated book full of strong characterization, a mystery, and well there was that one explosion.

Those detractors can all rest soundly after this issue. Things get exciting as we are introduced to a couple of new players investigating a very odd murder site. Julie gets the camera plugged in and checks out those photos from that fateful day at Moon Lake and Dillon heads to his girlfriend’s work to find out where she has disappeared to.

Spoilers are on, you’ve been warned. This issue finds us with a new tangential story with the investigators, but the parallel stories of Dillon and Julie are intertwined as we discover that Dillon is Annie’s boyfriend. What’s that? Who’s Annie? She’s the girl that got blown up in issue one. Turns out that she is the tie that bonds our two most prominent characters. What is even more astonishing is after a rather disturbing incident with a soldier, Julie discovers a connection to, you guessed it, Annie! Where this will lead and what it means are anyone’s guess.

All the while, Moore keeps up his great care with the nature of the people in his book. The two investigators are played as a down to earth nuts and bolt leader and a head in the clouds, life must be like television follower. We learn that Dillon has a temper. We see Julie in a rare moment of quiet and relative peace playing with her dog. More then any writer currently working, Moore has a way of giving a stage to the whole of human emotion and experience. He’s not writing a soap opera, although it is a story of extraordinary happenstance. The difference is that he writes not ham fisted characters but people who are just a dimension away from living and breathing.

Of course, all of this is helped by his capability with a pencil and ink. His lines are super tight this issue, he must have resolved the issues that marred the last issue. Here he is on the top of his game, with great action sequences and deep emotional resonance in his panels.

Moore is a master. There is no doubt about it. However, with great work already under his belt, he is not going to just bask in the praise of what he has done, he boldly presses onward and upward. Echo is a special book and if you aren’t reading it you are missing one of the best books on the shelf.