It’s snowing. Zachary Halo is getting delivery in the night from the U.S. Postal Service. It seems a little conspicuous, but Halo is being asked to sign for it, so he’s going to have to accept it in person even though he’s kind of busy with a couple of things that aren’t his. Turns out the package IS very much his. It’s a magical feather that he’s going to need a little later on in Hornsby & Halo #3. Writer Peter J. Tomasi and artist Peter Snejbjerg continue an interestingly offbeat coming-of-age action/adventure story with colorist John Kalisz. 

It’s not the magical feather that’s the cause of all the stress. It’s a wad of cash. But more than that, it’s a pearl necklace. There’s a lot of concern over it. Enough to raise the dead, in fact. Meanwhile Hornsby isn’t exactly loving her interactions with Halo. She’s still a bit unsteady with her run-in with the biker gang that she managed to survive. Halo’s hearse slammed into her bike. Or maybe she slammed into him. Either way it was NOT a good time and things are about to get worse when a small mob of zombies come looking for what’s theirs. 

Tomasi pieces the third issue quite well. There's a lot of energy going into the series. And that that energy runs across the page quite well. The mixture of drama and action and horror. All seem to be really well modulated. In order for a story like this to really feel like it's reaching for an emotional connection with the reader. It really does have to have a firm emotional grounding. And.Tomasi is doing a really good job of rent kind of a small town American fuel to the page that serves as a good starting point for all of the weirdness that serves as the center of the story.

Snjelbherg fits the artwork over a very narrow sort of a genre. There's definite horror here that could be done in a very gruesome way. However, the overall thrust of the series is one that is more in line with coming of age adventure fiction. So I can't afford to lean too heavily into the darkness. The artist does a good job of finding a place that got just enough menace and sinister elements to, deliver the reality of what's coming to the page. But it doesn't lose track of the fact that it still is very much at its heart a story of relations between one boy and one girl. And so that needs to be very much grounded in reality. And the drama of that comes across quite vividly with beautiful and sometimes breathtaking nuance.

At the end of the issue, it's still difficult to tell whether or not the series is going to go in a direction that's going to feel truly original. As it is the contemporary horror, contemporary fantasy elements still don't quite feel like they found their own voice yet. This is going to come in time as the mythology of the world gets a little bit more sharply rendered in and around the edges of the emotional center formed by the title characters.

Grade: B