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Lady Killer #4
Released by: Dark Horse Comics
Released on: April 1st, 2015.
Written by: Joelle Jones and Jamie S. Rich
Illustrated by: Joelle Jones
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Coming into this series for the first time? Get caught up here!
This penultimate issue starts off with a tense scene in which Peck has his gun to Josie's head. Always the company man, he needs her to go back to the scene of the crime and take care of the kid she let live. A fight breaks out but it's broken up by an old man with a shotgun. This gives Josie an 'out' and she takes it (and Peck's new car), while Peck pays back the old man, who was only trying to help a lady he thought was being assaulted, in a nasty, nasty way.
She makes it home and calls the neighborhood gossip queen, Edith Sampson, and tells her to keep an eye on the suspicious sports car parked nearby the school. Eager to have something going on, Edith agrees. And after that? It's back to normal life. A peck on the cheek from the husband, and a run with the girls to dance school but just as Josie's about to split the phone rings - Edith saw a man get in the car. What Josie really does though? She finds and then follows Peck to a Chinese restaurant. He's there to talk a woman named Ruby into paying her debt. He splits and Josie, using the girls as a distraction, forces Ruby to agree to a meeting later that night, presumably to give her some info.
That meeting doesn't go as planned.
With one issue to go, the plot has definitely thickened. We won't go into detail as to what happens in the last third of the story here but let it suffice to say that Josie's got her work cut out for her. The upcoming fifth and final issue will have to end with a showdown of sorts, it would seem that's the only logical option to close this tale off, but how that'll play out remains to be seen. Until then, we continue to realize that very few people in this book are who they appear to be on the outside and we continue to see how the female characters consistently outsmart their male counterparts. If that trend continues to the finale, it could spell bad news for Peck and Stenholm - but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it (in approximately one months' time).
As far as the art goes, Jones' style continues to impress. There's a genuinely amazing page here that shows what's going on inside a building - the borders of the house form the borders on the page and each panel is a room with something going on in it. That might sound like a minor thing and compared to nuclear war maybe it is, but it's cool. And this series has a lot of neat little touches like that throughout the four issues thus far that help make it interesting and… cool. Lots of neat style here and interesting angles used throughout - just some impressive and genuinely creative ideas taking shape on paper, it's a beautiful thing. Laura Allred's coloring compliments Jones' splashy, inky heavy style really nicely and the hues and pantones employed in this are interesting in that they really do add to the period detail that's a big part of the visuals in this book. Jones and Rich are four for four so far - and there's no reason to believe they won't knock the fifth and final issue out of the park.
