Advance Review: ‘Skinbreaker’ #7 Features An Epic Battle With Jaw Dropping Art

If you’re going to dedicate nearly an entire issue to an epic battle, you’d better have a fantastic artist drawing it. Rest assured that when that artist is David Finch, you’re in very good hands.

Finch puts on yet another master class in visual storytelling in Skinbreaker #7. As he has done throughout this limited series, he makes liberal use of splash pages and double-page spreads to give the story a sense of massive scope. After all, Finch is world-building here, and he needs a lot of real estate to do it. And we readers are the beneficiaries of that work.

This penultimate chapter of the series begins and ends with a bang, as the creatures being hunted for food early in the story have regrouped and attack the village. The villagers are torn between their old, disgraced leader Anok and the young upstart Paca, who chased him from the settlement. In an interesting twist, the older leader embraces more innovative ways of running the village, while Paca prefers to be more traditional. He eventually learns though, that those traditions come at a steep cost.

That is thanks to Robert Kirkman’s scripting. Kirkman’s story is not complicated, but when combined with Finch’s artwork, it provides a great 1-2 punch. (The pair are teaming up again for Terminal, once Skinbreaker concludes.)

Kirkman wisely takes a step back in this issue and trusts Finch to deliver the thrust of the story. And there’s a ton of thrusting here, as the body counts continues to rise over the course of the chapter.

Skinbreaker may not be breaking much new ground, but any opportunity to enjoy these two artists working together is rewarding enough.

Skinbreaker #7 — written by Robert Kirkman, illustrated by David Finch, colored by Annalisa Leoni, and lettered by Rus Wooton — will be available in comic book stores and on digital platforms on Wednesday from Image Comics.