Colder: Bad Seed #3

written by Paul Tobin
art by Juan Ferreyra

The horror of Colder has always relied on destabilizing the familiar, transforming something ordinary and comfortable into something threateningly strange.  Juan Ferreyra's homage to Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World—which imposes a depression-era Declan, a hatchet-wielding, shotgun-toting, long-john-wearing Sam Elliott look-alike, and a murder of crows hovering over the faraway barn into the oppressively sparse landscape—is just the same.  You know it, but you don't know it at all.

The explanation offered in Colder for Declan's extraordinary ability to heal the insane has never quite been satisfactory.  Why Declan?  Nimble Jack fed on so many, but none of them ever showed Declan's skills.  He touches people and cures them of their insanity, growing slightly colder with every touch.  That his fingers might not be entirely his own, that his history with the finger-obsessed farmer Swivel might go back farther than his history with Nimble Jack, makes some sense of the origins of his talents.  That is, of course, if the vision in the Hungry World can be believed.

Swivel's reign of urban terror remains a bizarre spectacle.  In each issue, he roams the streets, leering at hands, collecting fingers in his planting pot with his harvesting knife, leaving behind him a wake of bleeding and horrified victims as he slinks away unimpeded.  It's like walking through a nightmare.  We may imagine them un-restored, but there's some necessary illusion required to keep his reputation from outing him, like the unassuming invisibility of Nimble Jack.  And now we know that might somehow be the case.

"Barton has my gifts.  He is my hand.  And he is my grasp."  (Colder: Bad Seed #3: 16)

Declan keeps finding the same tenant building, some mirrored bridge between the real world and the Hungry World.  And he finds inside a collection of versions of himself, or perhaps just a hall of mise-en-abyme mirrors.  They show him himself, and himself doesn't have his own fingers.  Interrupted by a disorienting but resolute Reece, the couple go searching the building to find the truth, if the truth can be found in the Hungry World.  What they do find is a horror fable, featuring a dull-minded thief Declan Barton and a ruthless farmer with an axe.

Tobin's nightmarish villains may be the charismatic appeal of his horror story, but the companions-turned-friends-turned-lovers Reece and Declan are its heart.  Their gentle flirtation and easy intimacy in brutal circumstances make their love affair compelling, but Reece is weary of the danger and fearful of losing her mind again.  And Declan is little help in clarifying his own past, which continues to be unknown to him.  By the end of Bad Seed #3, paralyzed and consumed by Swivel, the Hungry World is no longer his to navigate.  Instead, it falls to Reece, should she choose to do so.

A door appears out of thin air as Swivel strides away with Declan in his belly.  "That doorway works.  You can show yourself out." (23)