A Gut-Punch Of A Finale In She Could Fly #4 From Berger Books
by Josh Davison
[*Mild Spoilers Ahead!]
Verna visits Luna and her family with the blueprints and equipment used to enable the Flying Woman. Things are tense, but they are made worse when the school counselor arrives and tries to kill Verna. Then, the U.S. government agents who have kidnapped Bill as well as the Chinese agents to whom Bill tried to sell the device storm Luna’s house. A shootout ensues.
She Could Fly #4 brings the story to a close, and it does so in a fashion both intense and heartwarming.
That is a hard combination to manage, and this is a comic of many extremes. It has one of the goriest shootouts I’ve seen outside of a Garth Ennis comic, but it tempers that violence with Luna finally being more open about her emotions and mental health.
It comes close to losing its scope, but it never quite does it. Amid the shooting at Luna’s house, you could almost forget that this is a comic about the intimate mental health problems of a teenage girl. However, it pulls itself back in before Luna’s issues are completely lost.
I will cop to some affection to high-action and gory violence—the aforementioned Ennis is among my favorite comic book writers—so I may have a higher tolerance for what happens in this book. That said, She Could Fly #4 really does accomplish an impressive balancing act, and it should be applauded for doing so.
Martin Morazzo’s artwork is, as I implied, intense in this issue. The shootout is incredibly gory, and the facial expressions of the wounded and killed can be downright haunting. Without onomatopoeia cues for gunshots, the gore can also feel very abrupt and surprising. Honestly, that works for me and adds to the intensity. Color artist Miroslav Mrva also puts in great work with a pale and cold color palette that keeps the world grounded and is balanced out from the amount of…well, red in the book.
She Could Fly #4 is a downright explosive and gut-punch of a finale with plenty of shocking violence and cathartic revelations. It’s a simultaneously ultraviolent and endearing conclusion and earns itself a strong recommendation. I definitely suggest giving it a read if you have the stomach.
She Could Fly #4 comes to us from writer Christopher Cantwell, artist Martin Morazzo, color artist Miroslav Mrva, letterer Clem Robins, and cover artists Morazzo and Mrva. It is published by Berger Books at Dark Horse.
