Colder #5

written by Paul Tobin
art by Juan Ferreyra

Apparently 0ºF is the perfect temperature for crazy.  Nimble Jack, having followed Declan and Reece back from the Hunger World and ambushed them in her kitchen, returns with Declan for the world's most sinister date night:  wine, candles, and conversation before Jack eats Declan's mind out of his living body.  Most of their dinner conversation is more of the same—Nimble Jack's malevolent and arrogant prodding and mockery, succulent but familiar—but it takes a turn for the interesting when they return to the asylum to revisit Declan's incarceration and the fire that let Jack into our world.

Declan's life before the asylum has remained a persistent mystery in Colder, but it's a mystery that Jack brings to our unsuspecting attention.  "Do you remember why you were brought here?  No?  You have a remarkable story, you know.  Oh, it's a happy tale of murders.  A hanging.  Betrayal.  And monsters, Declan.  Forty monsters.  Each one with a secret....  You were a monster, Declan.  An absolute monster" (Colder #5: 5).  Certainly, Tobin had dropped ominous hints about Declan's past, particularly since he was committed to an asylum for the criminally insane, but Declan's potential for violence hasn't been fully appreciated in the story until this issue.  As yet, even when he does morally questionable things, he does his best to rectify them, but his battle with Nimble Jack is supremely violent.

Once Nimble Jack wakes him back up, Declan puts a wooden post through his eye from under his jaw; bashes a wine bottle down his throat, breaking most of his teeth with apparent glee; punches him viciously and with pleasure in his genitals; crushes him with a wine bottle again; lets loose the dog-monsters from Hunger World, which Reece has to look away from; and ultimately sucks away Nimble Jack's mind/life just as Jack did others.  There's moment—mostly as Jack explodes and Declan manically exclaims, "And after all those decades, after these past couple of days, after all those times of you telling me everything gets hungry...   ...did you still think you were the only one?" (22)—when he seemed dangerously close to assuming Nimble Jack's role, which makes it so relieving when he settles back against the wall with Reece and into an awkwardly sweet and embarrassing conversation about his feelings for her.