A woman who used to be a goddess of death falls into a conversation with a temple. The temple has information that might be of use to the former deity. The temple would also like some information from the girl. A simple exchange is made that might not be quite so simple once the smoke clears in The Many Deaths of Laila Starr #4. Writer Ram V’s pleasantly minimalist plot is every bit as enchanting as it had been in the first three issues of the series. Artist Filipe Andrade continues to deliver richly idiosyncratic visuals on the stark drama of everyday life touched by earthbound supernatural forces. 

Former death goddess Laila Starr has been trying to track down the man who will invent immortality. She was there when he was a child and failed to do anything to stop him. She’d recently met him as a young man. It is years later, and that young man is now recognized as a genius. He is walking the path that will end death. Laila only wants to talk to him. There’s a temple that knows where he lives. It asks her to check on an old man who once visited the temple. Laila goes off on a simple quest with complex emotional ramifications. 

Ram V’s script has a simple, poetic quality to it that wouldn’t feel out of place in some ancient fairy tale. The casual conversations between an old temple and an out-of-work death god cause a few dominoes to fall that might have ultimately caused the whole problem in the first place. It’s cleverly intricate stuff that uses just a few details on a very small ensemble of characters to tell an unexpectedly provocative story that explores some of the deeper questions of life, death, and destiny. 

Andrade’s rendering of a small Chinese city has a charmingly rich atmosphere. Laila navigates the space thoughtfully under Andrade’s pen. There’s a deeply calm mood drawn into her. At first glance, it doesn’t seem like there’s all that much to the drama that would be all that engaging, but Andrade gives both Laila and the man she is pursuing a tremendous complexity. They’re strangers who have only met a few times, but they know each other...and Andrade does a brilliant job of delivering the distinctly awkward nature of that interaction. Anger explodes gracefully across the page when tempers flare, but Andrade never amplifies it so far as to make the drama seem like anything more than a conflict between two people. Andrade is admirably dedicated to keeping fantasy away from the visuals in the presence of simple human emotion. 

There’s one issue left to go in the series. The big revelation at the end of the issue twists the narrative in an interesting direction which calls into question some of the basic assumptions that Laila might have had about the nature of her situation. The cycle of life and death that the series has been following DID feel like it might have run the risk of becoming repetitious, but Ram V and Filipe Andrade turn things around at the end of the penultimate issue that should keep it fresh for the finale next month.

Grade: A