Día De Los Muertos #3

Tres
"Return of the Dead"
written by Alexander Grecian
art by Riley Rossmo

"Lonesome"
written by Kurtis J. Wiebe
art by Riley Rossmo

"Day of the Dead 3000"
written by Joe Keatinge
art by Riley Rossmo
colors by Megan Wilson

Día De Los Muertos #3 begins with a silent, mostly black-and-white horror story "Return of the Dead" and ends with the color-blitzed, futuristic apocalypse tale "Day of the Dead 3000."  Violence against children has featured prominently in each of the previous Día De Los Muertos collections as well, but "Return of the Dead" is a more classical serial killer tale told, however, entirely without words.  At a Day of the Dead festival, a young boy is kidnapped by a burly man with a Hulk Hogan mustache and a butcher's apron, collared, and taken to an isolated barn filled with torture equipment and the trophies of former kills.  As the murderer prepares for his newest victim, the spirits of his five previous arrive to exact vengeance and save the boy.  The story is straight-forward, but it is made all the more creepy for its silence, which forces the reader to work harder for the story and dwell longer on the stark images, as well as its sparse use of color—only red for the festival face paint and blood and pale teal for the ghosts of the dead children.

"Lonesome" echoes Kurtis Wiebe and Riley Rossmo's early collaboration in Green Wake.  It's a brief story of coming to terms with lost love.  During the morning of his funeral, young woman Natalie revisits her relationship with her lover, the unnamed narrator, through the sites of their first meeting at a bus stop and early dates.  He follows as a ghost.  However strong Green Wake, this chapter is somewhat hollow, and the narrator's anxiety over the substance and authenticity of their relationship seems all the more warranted for it.  Despite the impending funeral, she is listless and distant, melancholy but unmoved.  He may have loved her for the rest of his life, seven weeks as it turns out, but whether or not enduring, Wiebe leaves unsatisfied.

"Witness the end of all worlds!  The final reckoning for every known civilization!  No man, woman or creature will survive the unrelenting celestial wrath coming on a day many millenia in the making!" (Día De Los Muertos #3, p. 25).  The final contribution in Rossmo's series is this homage to futuristic pulp horror, a nod to exploitation science fiction, a welcome change of pace from the first two very somber stories, and generally a romping good time.  Facing off against a horde of robot skeletons armed with reaping scythes on a skull Mount Rushmore, bearded hero Ultra Muertos sacrifices himself, so that his unsuspecting grandson Kit Kidall, a fashion photographer with an addiction to a drug that allows him to glimpse the afterlife, may assume the mantle.  "Day of the Dead 3000" stylistically hearkens to an earlier era of comics which forces unrealistic dialogue with needed exposition into the mouths of its characters:  "I may not be able to kick this addiction to extinction red, but it's the only way for me to see my dead parents again!" (Día De Los Muertos #3, p. 29).  After such a conventional if fantastical beginning, the twist is both unexpected and quite bleak:  the young man, estranged from his superhero grandfather and seeking pharmaceutical escape into death, does not resist Mother Slaughter, the enemy of his predecessors, but welcomes the annihilation she promises.  He is a man fully welcoming to oblivion and extinction.