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Colder: Toss The Bones #2
Released by: Dark Horse Comics
Released on: October 28th, 2015.
Written by: Paul Tobin
Illustrated by: Juan Ferreyra
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New to this series? Check out our review of the first issue here! Got it? Good.
With Nimble Jack able to bop back and forth between the Boston of our real world and the ghastly alternate plane known as The Hungry World, well, the psychopath is out there doing his thing and making the best of it. His intent? To unify the agents of madness and get rid of Declan once and for all.
When this issue opens, Declan opens the door to his apartment but doesn't see anyone. That's a problem, because it allows Jack to basically slither in unnoticed. He and his lady, Reece, figure it's the kids down the hall screwing around. Declan goes back to his laptop to research prosthetics while Jack goofs off all around them - but they can't see him flipping about and juggling birds.
Young and in love, they head to the bedroom but Declan notices something odd… the light he just turned off keeps turning bac on. They figure the switch is acting up, they'll call the landlord in the morning. Jack just watches and laughs to himself. The next morning when she hits the shower she forgets her brush. She asks Declan for it and gets what she asked for, but he never got up from the table where he was sipping his morning coffee. The head out into the city for a walk, talking about past events - should Declan go to counselling? She thinks it would help, he's not so sure. Declan Thomas is in the past, Declan Barton is in the now and he's a good man. She loves him.
She heads to work, he to check out prosthetic options for his fingers. Jack, meanwhile, asks a homeless man to watch a pigeon for him… while he pours bleach down the poor bastard's throat. Growing more powerful, Jack is able to turn the taste of his insanity into little treats, the kind you can feed to stray dogs and that make those stray dogs just as nuts as he is.
Chaos ensues. Jack smiles. A little girl named Edith gets dragged down into the sewers, into a different world completely. And then Jack shows up at Reece's office and the pigeons arrive en masse.
The second issue of this latest Colder series takes the groundwork laid out in the first issue in some interesting directions. The emphasis here is on the relationship between Declan and Reese, how he's dealing with the effects of his past on their collective future, but the way that Tobin works Nimble Jack's eerie presence in and out of their reality is pretty clever. It's also pretty creepy. You get the subtlety of something like his monkeying with their light switch mixed in with his 'presence' showing up at Reece's office contrasted with the flat out insanity that manifests when he offers his treats to the dogs all within the pages of this one issue. It paints a rather grotesque picture, but it's not without its own sense of morbid humor. The character development and relationship drama elements anchor all of this, however, and that's important in a big way because it means that when the horror elements are the focus that the impact of those set pieces have some power behind them.
Juan Ferreyra's artwork is, once again, beautiful even when it's portraying horrible things. There's a visible tenderness and warmth to some of the scenes that Declan and Reece share together and there's just as much darkness and twisted comedy to the sequences where Jack manipulates things. All of this is rendered equally well with fantastic use of color (Eduardo Ferreyra assists here) in such a way that it manages to make something as mundane and ordinary as a common pigeon legitimately eerie.
