Lose It All With Everything #3
by Josh Davison
Mild Spoilers Ahead
Lori is losing it, and EB wakes up in a hospital bed with dreams of another woman. After he makes it home, EB’s wife says she’s going back to Everything despite both their kids having fevers. Peggy investigates her stuffed toy to see what could be making it talk to her and finds nothing. Lori discovers that she may have a malignant brain tumor, calls out from work, and goes to have her meeting at city hall with EB. He tries to give Lori a medal, and she adamantly refuses it. Plus, Marshall Gooder is coming to visit this Everything store to see if it’s up to his expectations.
Everything #3 continues the jarring surrealism of the series with a number of seemingly unconnected events casting a pall over Holland, Michigan. It all traces back to the opening of the Everything store, but surely just another big box store can’t be causing all of this, can it?
This issue reads like someone took Prisoner, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Grant Morrison and Derrick Robertson’s Happy! and put it in a blender to see what comes out. That’s intended to be high praise, because, despite how frustratingly vague and hard to follow Everything can be, the comic is absolutely enthralling.
The comic is deliberately vague with what “actually happens” and what is the product a character’s decaying sanity. Of course, the difference doesn’t really matter, as both have an impact on the story after the fact.
The plain presentation of all the strange aspects of the comic really adds to the unnerving atmosphere of it all. Nothing is given fanfare or a dramatic reveal. Artist I.N.J. Culbard renders everything in a straightforward and almost mundane fashion, and it makes the bizarre and horrifying reveals all the more disquieting. The color palette is bright but also relatively plain, which also aids this unnerving aesthetic.
Everything #3 is another strange and hard to parse out installment for the Dark Horse series. An odd series of events plays out, and we’re left to wonder how and why it all links back to the Everything store. It’s engaging, unnerving, and looks great. As such, this comic earns another recommendation. Check it out.
Everything #3 comes to us from writer Christopher Cantwell, artist and cover artist I.N.J. Culbard, and letterer Steve Wands.
Final Score: 8/10