So Rachel Rising has passed the six issue mark and the end of its introductory arc. In the first chapter following that arc, we get more character development and complications. The mysterious woman who seems to be at the centre of everything that happen appears in a different guise for the first time, or at least possesses the mind of a passerby to mutter her quotation at Rachel, "And they shall fall like snow". This is slightly spoiled in an uncharacteristic slip up on the part of Terry Moore as he holds the readers hand to tell them exactly what she is referring to:
"Death. She's talking about death."
I've not known Moore not trust his readers to interpret the work themselves before, and this is just clumsy and irritating. It feels so clunky that I'm not sure if it's a piece of misdirection put in by the artist, but even then it feels out of kilter with how the rest of the story has been told thus far (if such a thing had happened in the first couple of issues then I may well have dropped the title).
Nevertheless we shouldn't make too much of this. It stands out more because the rest of the comic has been so good, and Moore is such a great storyteller normally. The remaining sixteen (of eighteen) pages is as good as ever. We have a new character introduced in Detective Corpell who is investigating the crash that ended issue six, declarations of love to a corpse, more people coming back from the dead and a rather macabre Star of David. That final scene with the Star of David leads one to speculate that this could be something to do with the Holocaust, but would that be too obvious? I'm hopeful that it won't lead into some sort of hackneyed revenge tale, but will remain much more interesting and fulfil the promise it shows, and which Terry Moore's pedegree reinforces.
The underlying themes within this work are starting to emerge, and they are consistent with the artist's previous work in that the themes are ultimately about the personal relationships we create with each other in our everyday lives, and the importance of these relationships even in the face, especially in the face, of bigger, more dramatic events that happen both around and to us. In Strangers in Paradise we had the whole crime thing, in Echo there was the imminent man-made apocalypse, and here it is people dying violent deaths and then coming back. In all of these the important things, the aspects that Moore lingered on longest and that readers cared about, were the relationships the characters had built up with each other. Here we have Rachel, Jet, Aunt Johnny and Earl, and what the reader cares about is what they mean to each other. I would say that more than death, what readers fear in all of Terry Moore's work is that the characters will do something to betray each other, to hurt each other emotionally, and a desire to see people treat each other with kindness and love is no bad thing.
Anyway after all that, I'm still unsure as to where it is all leading. What I am sure about is that, wherever the journey leads, it is incredible fun getting there.
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