Only Skin #5
Well that sure cleared a lot of things up. I went back and read the first four issues of this series again and came away even more impressed with Sean’s attention to detail. Cassie and Clay, for example, were clearly named because their father has a poster up in his apartment of Cassius Clay, it’s starting to look like Paul is going to play more of crucial role in this series than I had originally thought (based on new information about his medical condition and the fact that we still don’t know exactly why we moved to town), the sheriff’s insistence of sticking to the book and trying to arrest trespassers for going into the forest is going to get them all killed, and Albert is looking more and more shady all the time. Oh, and Sean’s skills as an artist improved tremendously from the first issue, even though I don’t recall thinking it looked bad to begin with. So what happens this issue? Jordan drags Clay further into the forest, more ghosts are discovered, the identity of the original ghost is still not determined (although it sure seems like it’s their dad), Rachel is determined to be the textbook definition of a home-wrecker, that deer they hit at the end of the last issue has mysteriously vanished, and Cassie starts her own journey into the forest (on foot). And I think I complained about the pace in which these issues come out in the last review, but looking back this is the fifth issue at the start of 2010 and the series started in 2007, so that’s a pace of better than an issue a year. Blistering speed for most small press series, and it’s not like Sean is able to make a living off this stuff (yet, he sure has the talent to do so eventually), so I shouldn’t complain. It’s mostly because this is such a fascinating series, and finally reading them all in a chunk really brings home how great this is going to be as a graphic novel. But that can’t happen until the whole series comes out, or until he has enough of this done to make sense as a self-contained story, so I’m all for keeping up the gentle nudging to help make that happen. $4
