Farmhand vol. 3: Root of All Evil

Things go from bad to worse for Zeke Jenkins and his family in this volume.  First his dad has a bad run-in with the local voodoo priestess.  Then, after crawdads start killing people Zeke has to find out if it has anything to do with the Jedediah Seed.  To no one’s surprise, the seed is fully responsible and it has mutated into a wild variety that doesn’t require its namesake’s permission to grow.  While all this is going on, Monica Thorne is continuing to increase her grip on Freetown’s citizenry by spreading her special brand of produce all around the town.  Eventually Jedediah realizes that he can’t solve this problem by working at it from around its edges.  He’s going to have to go to its source:  Monica herself.  The thing is that it’s not entirely her fault, as Zeke gets a vision that shows him what really happened the night his mother and Monica almost died.

“Root of All Evil” was building itself up to be a real game-changer for the series.  Things were getting out of control with killer crawdads and plant-controlled people walking around.  Jedediah’s penchant for keeping secrets was also finally coming back to bite him in the worst way, while Monica was preparing to flex her newfound muscle.  All of these things were threatening to come together at the very end to change the shape of the series into something else.  Maybe a full-on open conflict between Monica and her followers and the Jenkins family in the plant-ravaged ruins of Freetown.

That doesn’t happen.  In fact, the end of vol. 3 came off as strangely anticlimactic after all of the buildup to it.  It felt like creator Rob Guillory was getting ready to switch things up in a big way, but changed his mind at the last second.  I’m not saying that the ending to this volume doesn’t work, as that final page suggests some dark potential for Zeke’s storyline in vol. 4.  “Root of All Evil” ultimately comes off like a case of over-promising and under-delivering to me.  Disappointing as that may be, it’s not enough to put me off the series yet.