The Moon is Following Us vol. 2

Things were looking hopeless for Sam and Dun after they were betrayed in their struggle to wake their daughter Penny and bring her back to the real world.  Fortunately their daughter turned out to have allies they never considered and these parents now have a fighting chance.  Which meant that vol. 2 was all set to play out exactly as I expected it to:  With utterly stunning visuals doing their best to elevate a story that was basically competent and nothing more.  Riley Rossmo certainly delivers on that front, delivering lots of stylish dreamworld action and designs every time he puts pen to paper.  Daniel Warren Johnson again just handles the parts set in the real world, but he’s a guy who can make a father’s struggle with a busted child’s carseat into a stunning visual.

Had this been all we got, I’d have had no problem recommending both volumes of this series to existing fans of these creators and looked forward to seeing what they did next.  Except that at the end of the second issue of this volume, Johnson hints that Dun has some deeply unpleasant trauma lurking in his head.  The kind of trauma that could upset the family-friendly adventure tone that the writer had been delivering since the start of this series.  I was hoping that the writer wasn’t going to go there, but he does and drags down the entire series as a result.

Look, I’m not saying that he can’t write about this kind of thing.  It’s just that it feels completely out of place in a series where a woman wields half of a man-eating shark on a stick into battle.  It’s also a much more disturbing subject than the very familiar dead mommy issues Sam is carrying around.  To the point where the way that it’s dealt with here feels like it’s trivializing the subject by turning it into a problem that can easily be solved in a frivolous fantasy series.

I can kind of see what Johnson was going for in the end, what with Penny’s involvement in the ending, but by that point it’s too late.  You’re left feeling disturbed by this weighty subject being used in what feels like a way to generate cheap drama and wishing that Dun could’ve had, I dunno, his own dead daddy issues?  No, it wouldn’t have been unique compared to his wife’s, just more appropriate to the material.  Which leaves me worrying that I’m going to have to start bracing myself for more badly judged plot elements in Johnson’s future work.