Review: ‘Ain’t No Grave’ #1 Draws The Reader In!
by Anton Kromoff
Summary
What happens when you have to fight Death itself to stay alive? Ain’t No Grave begs that very question that troubled a troubled youth and does so in a way that feels honest.
Overall
10/10Welcome to the table,
As a person with a degenerative disability, I’ve often faced my own mortality. The tip of a surgeon’s scalpel, the fits of an angry bully, the grip of my own body as it attempts to twist itself into strange shapes that should not be. While I have long come to make friends with Death (Capital D thanks to Terry Pratchett), there was a younger, more angry me that often thought I would, at some point before my sands were fallen, have to find and fight the taker of souls.
What happens when you have to fight Death itself to stay alive? Ain’t No Grave begs the very question that troubled a troubled youth and does so in a way that feels honest.
Skottie Young and Jorge Corona (alongside Jean-Francois Beaulieu and Nate Piekos) breathe life into this death march of a miniseries that slowly burns from the pain and weight of a death notice you get from a doctor to the magic realism of the space between spaces, and then it travels beyond.
Focused on a woman with a seemingly violent past, this Western fantasy has magic, mystery, and mythos colliding in ways that are nothing short of spectacular in both the written and drawn lines.
I don’t know what is happening next, but I know I am here for it, until the inevitable bitter and bloody end.
Until next time, the bit with the riverside pastor is spectacular, and the “Doorman” is truly brilliant character design. This book could spread out into a vast fantasy landscape and I would happily explore it time and time again.
