JEFF LEMIRE – writer
ANDREA SORRENTINO – artist
DAVE STEWART – colors
STEVE WANDS – lettering & design
Synopsis in a Sentence: Father Fred faces his fate in a fraternal Gideon Falls. (Or maybe I just like alliteration too much.)
We’ve been following around a time jumping priest the last few issues (Fred’s predecessor?), but now we get back to our main protagonist, Father Fred, who finds himself in a different version (time?) of his Gideon Falls. If memory serves, he had switched places, literally, with the protagonist of this GF, Norton. Norton’s shrink, Dr Xu, is there to confront the father, who has some sort of timey-wimey amnesia, and runs off.
Fred stumbles across a couple of winos who give him a bottle of booze, and uh-oh, our recovering alcoholic priest doesn’t pass it up. What follows are hallucinations (maybe) of the infamous Black Barn, two guys chasing Fred, and I assume a past meeting with a young woman named Rebecca. She tells the father “He knows,” and I’m led to believe that the two had some sort of romantic tryst, maybe even committing- gasp!- adultery. We even see images of Rebecca hanging, before turning into Smiling-Man.
Meanwhile Dr Xu heads back to Norton’s and takes one of his little surgical masks before heading back to the last place she saw Norton. She find’s the father’s collar there, tracks him down not far away, has a bit of confusing back and forth with him, and then asks what he knows about the Black Barn. The end.
This issue felt short, but maybe it was just the quick pacing that had me burning through the pages. There were the usual bits of WTF moments, scares, and added intrigue with the Rebecca mystery. As usual, Sorrentino’s art style matched Lemire’s tone, and we got another good issue of Gideon Falls.
8.5/10
