In a stacked week of new comics, it’s always impressive when something new manages to stand out, and this week that achievement goes to Image Comics’ brand new series Everything Dead & Dying. The new series comes from the talented creative team of Tate Brombal, Jacob Phillips, Pip Martin, and Aditya Bidikar, who simultaneously paint a vivid picture of the world at its best and at its worst while piercing the veil of grief and tension with just the slightest light of hope. While we’ve seen elements of this story before, we’ve never seen them woven together quite like this, and it’s already got its hooks in deep.
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Everything Dead & Dying lives up to its name, though not perhaps in the way you are expecting. Those expectations and assumptions are played on throughout the first 75% of the issue, keeping you guessing and attempting to connect the various dots as an impending sense of sadness and dread starts to envelop everything. Just when you start to settle in with what the book is going to be, it shakes everything up in the final pages, which will certainly have major ramifications on not only the main character’s journey and purpose but the survival of everyone else.
It all centers around a man named Jack, and the story plays out over the course of a bedtime story from Jack to his daughter, Daisy. As the story unfolds, you start to get a sense of who Jack is and what’s important to him, but the edges start to fray more and more as the issue moves forward, revealing the tragic existence that Jack now finds himself living in.
Brombal is an expert at this style of storytelling, as one need look no further than House of Slaughter and Green Lantern Dark for other poignant examples of his style at play. Meanwhile, Phillips and Martin deliver superb work over the course of the opening issue, with the switches in perspective shaking you up at every turn as they bring out the gruesome aspects of this new world in truly gnarly form. The quieter moments perhaps hit even harder though, and one of the more impressive elements of the series is how impactful each shift into the past truly is and how it also affects Jack in the present.
We’ve seen concepts of a dystopian world after an outbreak or virus plenty of times in the past, but as with some of the best examples of those stories, Everything Dead & Dying finds a crucial human tether to that concept that grounds it in something more than just shock value. In this case, it’s an even more personal story and hinges on Jack’s navigation of this cruel place. There have been elements of this in other stories, but few to the magnitude of what Jack has to deal with on any given day, and the effect it would have on anyone who has lost what he’s lost.
Everything Dead and Dying isn’t for the faint of heart, but those who dive into this challenging world will find a heart-wrenching story of loss, love, family, and survival, and it’s not a journey you’ll forget anytime soon.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
What did you think of the issue? Let us know in the comments!
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Image courtesy of Focus Features.
