Wild’s End #1 // Review
Roddy Packer has his eye on a lady. She’s a pretty rabbit. He’s always asking for her hand in marriage. Won’t agree to it until he gets his own boat. The skipper, who is the captain of the boat, is an old dog. They’re going out for a month. Could be his last trip. Might be surprised by what they find when they come back in Wild’s End #1. Writer Dan Abnett crafts a remarkably interesting mystery on the tiny canvas of a tiny town inhabited by various anthropomorphized animals. The world is brought to life by artist I.N.J. Culbard.
Roddy and company are headed out on the Merry Beet. It’s a nice little vessel. Humble. It’s going to be a tricky month. Very important month. The old dog’s getting to be too old to manage the boat anymore. It would be really nice if they had a big haul. Halfway into the trip, the wireless goes out. Might have to turn back. By the time they return to shore, they’re going to find everything as it was–except for the residents of the town. No one is to be found at all. Where have they all gone off to?
Abnett works with a rather large ensemble of characters in a rather small town. It’s sharp storytelling for a mini-series. Everyone in town knows everyone else. There’s a palpably rich interpersonal dynamic that serves to give the series considerable depth. Abnett is setting the series in an early 20th-century U.K.-like world. Plot points hang lazily in the background. Abnett is providing so much detail for the small town. The reader is even given a couple of pages of the town paper to peruse. The meteor activity that’s been going on seems to be something of a major hint, but there is SO much working around the edges of the plot. It’s difficult to tell what happened to everyone...why they all disappeared…
It’s also a bit of a mystery as to why Abnett decided to make the town entirely inhabited by anthropomorphized animals. The dogs and cats and badgers and things add nothing to the plot. There doesn’t seem to be some deeper meaning to the choice of animals, as might be the case in Zootopia or Spiegelman’s Maus. The animal ensemble DOES add a very cute and cozy feel to the visuals that Culbard is putting to the page. There’s a very cozy feel about the town as well. Everything is so neat and tidy with clean lines and largely uncluttered lives. The visual reality of Wild’s End feels like a warm hug from childhood. Then there’s the disappearance and something darker...
The darkness that Abnett inserts at the end of the first issue suggests that there’s a greater darkness on the horizon. There’s every possibility that things could start to get VERY disturbing as the series progresses. It’s a mystery, yes...but there’s just enough to suggest that there might be kind of a deeper horror lurking beneath the surface of it all.
