Joe Death and the Graven Image

The title character is an undertaker/bounty hunter who is wandering through the dusty land when he comes across a village that is also the site of a massacre.  As he buries the bodies left to rot there, he’s informed by a kinsman that there’s one survivor, a baby, to this event.  Though he initially refuses to go after the infant, the bug in his chest promises to try and convince Joe to do so.  Thus begins a quest through a surreal landscape involving treacherous witches, similarly treacherous exes, friends who may or may not be able to be trusted, and determined competition to the man’s task at hand.  It’s all enough to make you wonder why Joe even bothers to get up in the morning.

I was attracted to “Joe Death” in the solicitations because it promised the kind of weirdness that I tend to only see in the Mignolaverse these days.  While creator Benjamin Schipper boasts an appealing art style that’s between Mignola and Andrew MacLean’s, with a more old-timey-cartoonish bent, that’s where my praise for this volume ends.  Schipper’s writing style is the wordy, overwrought kind of poetic that mistakes eloquence for comprehension.  In trying to be fancy, his words fail to communicate character, worldbuilding, or the plot itself in a way that makes any of these things interesting.  Reading through this was a genuine chore, and while Schpper promises that this is only the start of Joe’s journey at the end, that reads as more of a threat than a promise to me.