Aint No Grave #4 Review

 

Writer: Skottie Young

Artist: Jorge Corona

Colorist: Jean-Francois Beaulieu

Letterer: Nate Piekos

Editor: Marla Eizik

Cover Artist: Jorge Corona

Publisher: Image

Price: $3.99

Release Date: August 7, 2024

 

The Sheriff in Cypress told Ryder she arrived too early to take the train, so the stablemaster suggested she take Her Blind Majesty instead. After Ryder won her marker on the casino boat, the concierge threw her off, and she washed ashore near a stone and wood tower. Can Ryder earn a reprieve from death from the master of the underworld? Let’s saddle up, ride into Aint No Grave #4, and find out!

 

Story

A ghost town surrounds the tower. Ryder enters an abandoned saloon. A lamp reveals her tired and wounded face in the mirror behind the bar. She takes the bottle and glass from the bar and has a drink. Then she pours another. Why not? She doesn't have to pay for it, and no one is here to stop her.

 

The alcohol and the glass remind Ryder of her home. She sat inside the house she wanted. As Ryder drank alone, she coughed blood on her hand. Enraged, she threw the glass across the room and overturned the dining table. But Ryder’s rage died when her daughter opened the door. Joey stood at the doorway, watching her mother drink alone in the ruins of the saloon.

 

Ryder runs outside. She chases Joey through the rain, only to stumble and fall in the mud. On her journey to Cypress, music accompanied a procession of souls marching toward a river. This evening, Ryder follows a melody into the dark tower. Joey stands beside a lanky, desiccated guitarist, playing his steel strings as his fingers bleed. A tear appears beneath his hat brim as he gently weeps while Ryder's distraught daughter cries a river.

 

In Aint No Grave #4, Ryder struggles to make sense of a nightmare. But she doesn't belong in the tower any more than with Darius. Ryder stole from others, killed anyone who tried to stop her, and thumbed her nose at the system. She married a man who valued society's opinion over her identity. They brought a child into their domestic delusion. Ryder created a dream because she couldn’t build a reality. So, in her final moments, she is trapped in a nightmare of her own making.

 

Art

When Ryder spotted the tower, it resembled the pillars thrust up through the surface by Sybok’s god. But as she nears, darkness falls. Amid the torrential rain and crackling lightning, the silhouette evokes a plant. Arrayed in her voluminous coat, Ryder resembles a flower rising from the soil, awaiting the sun's rays to stretch forth its petals. Blood and mud cake her face. Small square shots of the whisky glass link larger panels of Ryder staring at a bottle in the saloon and her home. In the aftermath of her tempestuous rage, Joey's shadow stretches across the room, backlit by daylight. While in the saloon filled with broken furnishings and furniture, the lightning propels her daughter's shadow toward the bar.

 

Jean-Francois Beaulieu lavishes a nuanced palette on Jorge Corona’s expressive, dramatic, and haunting art in Aint No Grave #4. Ryder traded her traveling clothes for a black suit and white blouse aboard Her Blind Majesty. She throws on her gray coat but charges through the blue night and into the tower. Amid the patchwork interior, a guitarist in a gray suit and one of Snake's old top hats plucks chords without a pick. He wears a red scarf around his neck, sits on broken wood, and rests his feet on train tracks. Ryder lost her red scarf when she donned her funereal finery. Yet Ryder will regain it, and the leather gloves evoking her sunflower dress amid her desperate fight for another crack at life.

 

Skottie Young’s silent script for Aint No Grave #4 gives Nate Piekos time for a drink and a game of cards in his neighborhood saloon. His rough-hewn logo adorns the cover, and his weathered chapter title stretches across the dark tower on the opening page. Black music notes shine against an orange-yellow background, their white frames evoking the cards that led to the players' eternal doom aboard Her Blind Majesty. Yet after the action-packed nightmare, large white uppercase letters in a black dialogue balloon suggest that the time for Ryder to board the train has arrived. Thanks to Image for providing a copy for review.

 

Final Thoughts

Aint No Grave #4 makes us question everything we thought we knew. Like another hand dealt by Madam Gates, events may play to Ryder’s advantage or her detriment. As her life flashes before her eyes, Ryder refuses to stop fighting until she meets the one she came to Cypress to see. Does she have another card to play? Or is Ryder destined to tread the same path until she accepts that this is a game she cannot win?

 

Rating 8.2/10

 

For another cover see my review at Comic Book Dispatch.