The mayor of a small town announces that there will be elections for his position. As a displaced former resident finds the echoes of a violent past haunting her in idyllic desolation elsewhere. Writer Bryan Hill continues a simple journey into the complexities of modern violence as Postal Deliverance reaches its third issue. Artist Raffaele Ienco grants a heavyweight to the horrors of human violence in a carefully-etched emotional landscape. That carves a visual depth into Hill’s simplification of the darkness in the heart of human endeavor. The stark simplicity of the story threatens to weaken the overall narrative, but Hill and Ienco continue to explore a compelling tale which carefully reflects on cycles of violence through the generations.

Mark is resigned to the prison of his own nature. That doesn’t mean that he has to accept his fate on his own terms. Other people are going to have to be the ones who decide who runs the town of Eden as he announces elections. Later-on, his wife, speaks of the possibility of leaving the darkness of the town, but Mark knows that the darkness will follow him. Elsewhere former resident Laura has been helping a bullied boy named Pascal who has now become a bully himself. Things seem to be going in a dark direction for the young boy. Things are about to get much worse for him. 

Hill’s exploration of the nature of violence is simple enough to have plenty of room to move through 20 pages of narrative. Mark wants to leave, but he knows he can’t. Laura has left only to find that the violence is elsewhere for her too. So she’s finding out what Mark already knows. It’s a theme that Hill quite nearly pounds the reader of the skull with, but there IS an ugly kind of beauty in the stark simplicity of it that feels fairly engaging. The dramatic edges around everything carry an intensity of tension that powers the story. Unspoken emotion seems to weight down every painstakingly-rendered panel. 

Ienco’s stiff emotional snapshots continue to haunt the story. Everything is so totally still as drama crawls percussively across the page. Every vein can be seen on symbolically falling leaves as Mark makes his announcement. Complex emotions can be read in his face and the faces of everyone else in attendance. Elsewhere the stillness of Pascal’s confidence in the opening of the issue is echoed in his loss at issue’s end. 

There’s a very weighty static the covers the entire issue with every panel mercilessly weighted-down in heavy, heavy detail. It’s impressive stuff that adds a respectable depth to a dramatic story written in vast, simplistic strokes. It’s as though the art is attempting to draw attention to all those details that the script seems to be overlooked on an emotional level narratively. Too bad the complexity that’s lacking in the script is a dizzying complexity of human aggression that no amount of heavily-rendered line work could hope to render.

Grade: B-