Ain’t No Grave #5 // Review
And Death laughs when she says she’s changed. Ryder has come to Death with a pair of revolvers. She wants more life. And Death laughs. But it’s not like there isn’t a deal to be made. It’s not like Death is going to let her off easy, though. Writer Scottie Young and artist Jorge Corona reach the end of their story in Ain’t No Grave #5. The fifth issue is “Acceptance.” And with the fifth issue, Young and Corona allow the reader to come to terms with the fact that the series IS about what the series had apparently been about all along: grieving.
The deal is simple: Ryder has a couple of guns with a few bullets. Death will let her shoot. For every bullet that hits death, Ryder will get more time. For every bullet that misses, she’ll see a little bit more of what she’s missing. It’s a fool’s bargain. Think you can hit Death with a bullet? Of course not. That doesn’t mean that you’re not going to try, though. Death itself is giving you a chance. You’ve got the guns to fire at it. Who WOULDN’T take a few shots for a little bit of extra time? What have you got to lose but your life?
With everything else well and fully laid-out over the course of the first four issues in the series, Young is closing-out the equation in the final issue. It feels a bit predictable...which might feel engagingly inevitable for the right readers who might have had the good fortune to connect-up on an emotional level with Ryder. It’s been an interesting journey that’s been quite deep...playing with cowboy western tropes and looking into the depth beyond them in ways most entries into the genre prefer to avoid.
Corona’s art does a very sharp job of engaging the reader. Ryder’s wide-eyed emotionality scrambles its way off the page with the heart and pulse of a character who would really prefer to be in an ongoing series. She seems to know that she isn’t with every passing panel. There’s some beautiful composition on so many of the panels and the overall layout is exquisitely well-balanced in so many ways. Inevitability flows across the page as death stands there expressionlessly looking-on. There isn’t a whole lot to the plot, but Young’s lack of complexity allows Corona plenty of space to breathtakingly render broad emotions.
Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross came-up with the five stages of grief. Then she said that not everyone goes through them in order. And not everyone goes through all of them necessarily. And...well...it’s really just a vague model that people can take comfort in, but it’s not a bad outline for a cleverly non-traditional cowboy western horror-fantasy. There’s been real poetry in the series as it has made its way to its own inevitable conclusion. It’s a very sharp sort of an allegory that looks at the deeper horror at the heart of every good-guy cowboy story.
Grade: A
