Precious Metal #6 // Review
Selina is approaching her father. She’s asking if he’s busy. It’s more of a rhetorical question than anything. He’s clearly sitting there in front of an inert body that’s resting on a table. There are weird pastel cords that could be entrails hanging all over the room in a big, hopeless spaghetti. Of course he’s busy. And this is only the beginning of Precious Metal #6. Writer Darcy Van Poelgeest and artist Ian Bertram conclude their dark fantasy with colorist Matt Hollingsworth. The somber energy of the series continues to split out in a number of different strange and surrealistic ways that continue to engage on many different levels.
She’s asking her father what makes the one on the slab so special. “Absolutely nothing.” He says. He’s about to change that, though. He has created an ending to the world that he thinks is miserable. And perhaps the ending will be equally as miserable, but at least it will be over. And maybe an end needs to be put to the end as well. It all seems to be echoing out in so many surreal ways. It's hard to imagine the whole thing coming to an end. All things end, though. It’s only a matter of time.
Darcy Van Poelgeest lets loose on the restless energy that had been building up over the course of five issues with only occasional spurts of explosive energy. It all comes to an end here. At least for now. And there's a strong sense of a major conflict that rushes through the issue with great balletic grace. Much of what the author is doing is just allowing the artist to move the way they need to move in order to give a satisfactory ending to the whole thing. It's reasonably impressive as it moves. The type of narrative poetry that makes for a very distinctive experience on the comics page. They wouldn't fit quite well in any other format.
A portion of what makes it what it is is Berri's work in rendering this very surreal world. The layout of the page is notable. Bertram stacks each page with quite a few horizontally oriented panels that feel aggressively flat. This pushes the eye down very quickly through action that plunges down the page. it's beautiful stuff that has its own sense of acrobatic motion. It's really impressive to see such beautifully surreal stuff move as quickly and brutally as it does. It's very impressive.
The action moves with thoughtful grace as well. It comes to a conclusion in a way that expands the world that had been introduced in the prior series quite well. There is so much going on in and with the story that glances across the page briefly. So often a fantasy like this is so heavily rendered in concepts and details that the script feels the need to over render. One of the most beautiful things about this series in the series that preceded it was just the way the script interacts with everything that's going on in the visual and the comic book.
