Xombi #4 – Review

By: John Rozum (writer), Frazer Irving (artist)

The Story: So you worked as a librarian in a castle built on a giant floating skull—how quaint.

The Review: The most delightful thing about reading Xombi is the deep sense of creativity fully at work here.  Most of the fantasy elements we get from mainstream comics tend to play in familiar, safe territory: magicians, demons, ghosts, and the like.  Even when Rozum uses these archetypes as the basis for his stories, he always gives them fresh spins, but usually, he goes much farther afield, pitching the most unexpected concepts at you.

In this issue, Rozum packs in a lot of fun asides that get only a brief mention, unlikely to be even seen in the future: “…vegetarian recipes from Mars from back when it had natives to still call it Ma’aleca’andra; four of the seven swords of skin; a jar containing a captured chimney wraith; pearls of wisdom collected from oysters grown in the Sea of Tears…”  They arrest your imagination, but always feel like they only scrape the surface of what’s in store for this title.

Most of these details get offered by the latest strange case to fall into David’s indestructible hands, the shockingly well-preserved Annie Palmer.  Even though her attempts to explain her unusual past results in an incredibly chatty issue, she has an active, sympathetic narrative voice that gets across all the expository history of her life on the Skull Stronghold and her grim affair with the impeccably manipulative Roland Finch.

Hearing how Finch causes the denizens of the Stronghold to destroy themselves from within (and using Annie to do it) really brings new meaning to the jerk boyfriend.  The guy has the perfect tone to be a top-rate villain: an overgrown spoilt child with such a nauseatingly high opinion of himself that he won’t even dirty his hands to get his goals done.  By the time he finishes his callous speech to the devastated Annie, you’ll want to suckerpunch him yourself.