Gideon Falls Volume 1: The Black Barn

/ Alex Good

Gideon Falls Volume 1: The Black Barn

There are a lot of horror comics out there. I’m not sure why this particular genre should be so popular, but it’s always been a thing from back in the day when EC got into its groove (that is, after giving up on being “Educational Comics”). And while horror comics did suffer a lengthy time out in the doghouse when the censors cracked down, since the Comics Code fell into disuse they’ve been on a tear.

That said, with so many horror titles coming out you can expect a lot of variation in the quality. There are some series I’ve recently really liked and a few I didn’t get into at all. And the blame seems to attach equally to writers and artists when things don’t go right. Either the story makes no sense or the visuals are confusing or indecipherable.

I think Gideon Falls walks up close to this line, but for the most part I was really impressed with it. Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino team up again after working together on the Old Man Logan series, with results that feel really different but are equally effective. I thought the way Sorrentino’s experimental layouts and how he fragments a page worked really well, especially the double-page spread when Dr. Xu has her vision. It’s disorienting in a way that’s a perfect fit for what she’s experiencing. I might even call it creepy. Let’s face it, most horror comics aren’t actually very scary, but this one had its moments.

The story was vague and a bit generic. The Black Barn seems like the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks, in being an inter-dimensional place of evil that scary things come out of and that you don’t want to visit. One of the heroes is a priest with the usual worldly issues to deal with, and heaven knows that’s a clichéd figure. The business about him needing to reclaim his faith was something I didn’t need. The other main character is a guy whose visions have turned him into a mental patient. Again, the kind of person you expect to meet in this kind of tale, but all the same not unwelcome as a sympathetic figure we can relate to.

So it’s not a story that feels all that original, but I thought Lemire did just enough to make it fresh and interesting. The two threads of the story were, a bit to my surprise, nicely interwoven both visually and with the text, and the plot builds to a satisfying break. It doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, but takes us to a point where I was hooked and wanted to see what comes next.

Graphicalex

12 thoughts on “Gideon Falls Volume 1: The Black Barn”

  1. So, these guys are the ones responsible for Old Man Logan? Comics and storylines like that make me wish the comics code WAS still enforced.

    Huh, I had no idea (or had forgotten) that EC was education comics. I guess telling scary stories is educational though.

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    • The Old Man Logan comics were better than the movie!

      Yeah, EC started out with good intentions. Illustrating Bible stories was also a big part of their model. Then they realized what people really wanted was Tales from the Crypt.

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      • I was gonna say I’d never heard of any such movie as Old Man Logan, but I see the movie was called Logan. I’ve heard of that. It’s a Marvel thing so of course I never saw it. Even if I could stand the bloat of any given film, the uber-bloat of the Marvel “universe” just makes me ill.

        I was thinking it was horror, like this new one. Was really wondering what sort of awful things happened to prompt your comics code remark. Turns out it’s just “deconstructionism of superheroes”? : -) Well, to be honest, I can understand that. It’s all part of the turn to “dark” that’s really just emblematic of a country’s moral compass that got way too close to the liberal magnet. (Not to get political, you understand.)

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      • Old Man Logan is a series of Marvel comics that have Logan/Wolverine in an alternate, dark universe. Or really a couple of different universes. And they’re actually quite good. Will be posting reviews of them coming up. Booky is mixing up his dislike of the movie Logan, which is something completely different. The Comics Code Authority was started in the 1950s and it was all about the industry looking to stay in the good graces of the government by setting up a self-regulating authority that would keep comics clean and decent. Which really clamped down on horror and crime comics. By the 1980s and ’90s most publishers were drifting away from it and in the twenty-first century I think it’s been totally abandoned.

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      • Yeah, I think I saw something to the effect that the movie is only partly based on the comics. Not that that matters: it could also just be a lousy adaptation. Still, “dark” is an iffy proposition. There’s realistically dark and then there’s nihilism. If you say they’re good, I’ll assume they don’t fall into the latter category.

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      • The original comic was pretty bleak. It’s a world where the supervillains have all taken over and the heroes are all dead. As the series went on (the Lemire and Sorrentino issues) it mainly became all about the fighting. But Logan is a burned-out case for sure.

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