Bone Parish: Volume Two

Better than I was expecting. I’d enjoyed the first Bone Parish volume but had just recently read BRZRKR: Volume Two and it was a big letdown that I thought typical of the middle stretch of most series/trilogies. Meaning it was a bore where the story was just marking time. There’s some of that here, but Bone Parish: Volume Two mostly builds quite nicely on the original story, sort of like the second season of Breaking Bad (which is the obvious comparison to make), with the Winters family having to face ever greater threats to their drug business. I also really liked the idea of cooks for other gangs trying to reverse engineer their own brand of Ash and coming up with a bad batch that melts people into composite monsters reminiscent of The Thing. That was a great, and necessary, step up in the horror.

The cover is actually a variant cover for issue #3, as found in the bonus material for Volume One. It’s a good one, and pairs nicely with the cover for Volume One. The art still struck me as being hot and cold though. I still don’t like the faces, which seem further neutralized, at least in some ways, by geometric planes of shadow. But I did get a kick out of signature moments like the fly on Brae’s hand when he enters the mutant flophouse, or the biker’s face reflected in the pool of blood. Those get high marks.

A good story then, which moved things forward nicely if along predictable lines. I can really see this as a cable series now. I was only a little disappointed with how things broke off, with a series of cliffhanger moments. Again, that’s very cable series, but none of the plot points being introduced seemed very important, or were at all surprising. Still, I’m definitely on board for seeing how it wraps up.

Graphicalex