Faith #7 Review: The Right Way To Do Dark Comics
By Matt Conner
Faith’s latest arc takes a look at horror from a uniquely Faith perspective, managing to give a good scare while avoiding cliche and gore.
Faith #7
Written by Jody Houser
Art by Joe Eisma and Marguerite Sauvage
Published by Valiant Entertainment
Faith #7 cover by David Lafuente
Faith is consistently a breath of fresh air, bringing optimism and heart to gritty team books like Harbinger and Unity. With such consistency, readers forget the tragedy of her backstory. She survived the car crash that killed her parents. A teammate burned to death in her arms. Recently, her clone died to save her. Staying so perky means stuffing all of that down. And this week, it resurfaces.
Zephyr has been having nightmares. Bad enough on their own, but sometimes they happen when she’s awake. Corpses of lost loved ones insult her through mirrors and twist otherwise pleasant dream sequences. Maybe there’s a super villain behind all this. Maybe she’s tripped a curse somewhere. But maybe… maybe she’s finally dealing with the road that led her here.
Jody Houser loves this character and knows she needs pop culture references to live. But Houser also knows to keep those in service of a great story. Even a slow burn ghost story benefits from Zephyr’s chat with a coworker about why people watch gory fare like The Walking Dead. And of course a true geek with hallucinations is going to compare herself to Gaius Baltar and his immaterial Battlestar Galactica girlfriend. My personal favorite was when she used an obscure Giles joke from Buffy (“Tea is soothing; I wish to be tense.”) to try a little self-care.
And bringing in Joe Eisma, a man who could scare the pants off readers with an otherwise standard prep school scene in Morning Glories? Stroke of genius. This book looks so normal, and the ghosts pop that much more. This book wants to give you the creeps, but it won’t go to an amputation to get them.
Get to your retailer this week to see this perfect example of how to use horror without crossing a line.