Visitations
July 4th, 2003by Scott Morse
ISBN: 1929998341
I had high hopes for this book. The premise appealed to me: woman wonders into a church just looking for some quiet, and the priest bets her he can get her to admit that God exists by reading her three stories out of the day’s newspaper.
The art is interesting: printed in brown ink, with most of the book (the retold news stories) rendered in sepia tones. These look as though they were done as paintings, rather than inked or brushed sketches, and this worked well for the stories.
I have to say this is the first time I’ve really been bothered by the lettering in a comic. (I do find Vasquez hard to read sometimes, but his lettering fits with his art.) I suppose Morse could have done the machine-perfect all caps comic lettering himself, but it reads more like a generic “comics” font was used in the book. It wasn’t a good fit for the story. Something more subtle, lettering with some character to it would have worked much better and been less distracting.
Oni Press just reissued this book, as it was out of print. I can see why they would want to bring it back: clear concept, interesting art, solid and straightforward narrative, and though I haven’t read anything else by Morse, strong interest in the creator. The only problem was, it just didn’t have the depth I was hoping it would have; I expected even more.
In terms of subject matter, TenNapel’s book Creature Tech (much longer than Morse’s book, so he did have more pages to work with) dealt more effectively with faith and coming to believe. Maybe I just prefer my more mystery with my faith tales. Story-wise, Visitations was a package put together a bit too neatly for my taste.
This review was also posted at Four Color Hell, a comics weblog.
