Writer/Artist: C. Scott Morse
Publisher: Dark Horse
For those of you keeping track of our reviews of the three-issue Ancient Joe mini-series from Dark Horse, you'd have remembered that each issue received
, thanks mainly to the feeling that even issue one feels like coming in halfway through a movie, with no concession made for what has gone before.This is the trade collection of those three issues...yet gets itself
...why? Because, also collected are the other, and earlier, Ancient Joe stories, which fill in background information and give you a great handle on the character, before the three-part epic. Nowhere more so that the three-part verse that kicks off the book; effectively an origin story for Joe, how much better the series would've been with these three pages reproduced at the start of each issue, or even just issue one.Also explained in Ancient Joe's history with the devil, or El Diablo, which crops up mysteriously in the miniseries yet is explained by a neat short story that gives this book its subtitle - el bizarron. In Cuba, a story is told by children of El Bizarron, a man who fooled the devil and tricked him out of a donkey and a couple of sacks of silver. Of course, we see the story with Joe as the protagonist.
The three-issue series that forms the latter part, and the bulk, of this book, is essentially concerned with Joe trying to find out whether his wife went to heaven or hell when she died. Lucking into an encounter with a chap who has a daughter, who, for some strange reason and pop into and out of hell as desired, Joe sets up a deal and talks to her.
Her backstory, the real reason she can go to hell and back, is nasty, but her story gets nice closure by the end of the book, and Joe finds...if not satisfaction, then at least less apprehension.
The art is predominantly in a very rigid structure - for the miniseries it's four horizontal panels per page, for every page - a similar style is used in the "el bizarron" story, with a nice two-by-two layout for flashback sequences. It's the sort of book that benefits from a regular structure - no wild experimentation because there's no wild action, more a drama movie than a balls-out action piece. And it reads well, and you care about the characters, and by the end you understand a little more about the tragedy that is really behind Ancient Joe's life.
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