Bone Orchard: Tenement #2 // Review
The kid’s neighbor sees him in the hall. Tells him not to feel bad about the death of the old guy who lived in the apartment complex. He tells the kid that the dead guy wasn’t a nice person. Doesn’t offer any specifics. Just says he’s really good at reading people. Then, he’s gone. It’s an idle and pensive moment at the beginning of Bone Orchard: Tenement #2. Writer Jeff Lemire continues a story of haunting mystery with artist Andrea Sorrentino. The second issue reaches a kind of brilliance as it catches a striking contrast between incredibly mundane day-to-day human drama and something fantastically dark.
Vickie’s husband needs some money. That’s why he’s meeting with his brother. He’s a little behind in...everything. She has bills. He needs to pay for her medicine and her oxygen. He promises his brother this is the last time. That much they can both agree on. Elsewhere, the kid is having real problems. His mom’s trying to help him get the psychological help that he needs. It’s a tenement apartment. There are so many concerns. Then there’s some kind of darkness. It’s like the lights went out on EVERYTHING. (Or something like that.) Things are different. Everything might feel the same on the inside...but outside? EVERYTHING is different.
Lemire delicately renders the characterization of a group of people who all live at the same address. There’s a restlessness about everyone who lives there. They’re all working-class people just trying to get by. What Lemire is doing with the ensemble is really, really clever and emotionally intricate stuff. Then there’s the big stinger that comes midway through the issue that hits like a nuclear warhead. It’s a fusion between very real humanity and the supernatural. Lemire is slowly laying out the inner humanity of everyone before he launches the spectral darkness at them. It’s a technique that seems to be working quite well.
It’s really, really difficult to conjure real shock and horror to the comics page. Sorrentino manages a genuine jump scare when the stinger hits towards the end of the issue. It’s overwhelmingly stunning. So much of the issue leading to that moment is delivered to the page by Sorrentino with such fidelity to reality that it almost looks like she just took photos of models and just...posterized them with Photoshop to make them LOOK like comic book art. There’s such deeply soulful emotion. The colors are SO organic and natural, and there’s such a sense of stillness. And then that stinger hits, and it’s like something blew up on the page...some weird kind of portal opened up and dragged the reader with it.
And then everybody turns away from the horror and just tries to deal with it. It’s weird. The fantasy doesn’t work without the mundane. Hell is other people on the inside of the tenement, but there’s a whole different hell lurking outside. The real challenge for Lemire and Sorrentino moving forward is going to lie in maintaining the same kind of dichotomy between realistic emotional drama inside and the supernatural hell that rests beyond.
