Colder #4

written by Paul Tobin
art by Juan Ferreyra

Colder #4 spends a little too much time wandering around the Hunger World with relatively little narrative progress.  Certainly, Tobin and Ferreyra's vision continues to impress and dizzy.  It's a world of dog-things—half-pit bulls, half hands—in which crashing through a window lands you on the other side of a different window.  Declan's companion this trip is considerably more likable than most; he's crazy as well but he's clever and self-deprecating (and, as it turns out, also self-defecating).  He's got the most honest beggar's sign I think I've ever seen:  "Feel Good about Making ME Feel Good!!!  Only $1.99!!!" (Colder #4: 3).  He's generous and personable; he just thinks dogs' teeth are talking to him.

Colder persistently undermines its readers' expectations.  The woman in the toothpaste aisle couldn't seem more like Nimble Jack with her exaggerated smile lines and near fetishistic preoccupation with her prominent teeth, but ultimately she's just another woman in a drug store, and Declan's crazy (but true) rant summarizing his current predicament makes her suitably and hilariously uncomfortable in the check-out line.  Declan's attempts at making amends even more so.  After being confronted in the Hunger World by a giant bone-and-muscle monster, the creature unexpectedly backs off, smelling Nimble Jack all over Declan.  It's a moment that reinforces the universal fear of Jack—since a creature that terrifies even the Hunger World's vicious dog creatures is itself frightened of Jack—even as it unsettles the reader about the rules of this foreign world.

The most resonant scene is, however, Declan's discovery of Reece on an abandoned playground swing in the Hunger World.  She is quietly despondent, and her answer to Declan's plea to say something sane—"I hate you for ever bringing me here" (19)—is both relieving and devastating for Declan.  He brings her back to her apartment, where she assumes the helpless role that he inhabited for so many years, until the Hunger World starts making its way into her apartment, washing out its colors and bleeding down the wall beneath her pictures.  And Nimble Jack comes to take his due.