A harsh conclusion.
Creative Staff:
Story: Lonnie Nadler, Zac Thompson
Art: Sami Kivela
Colors: Jason Wordie
Letterer: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
What They Say:
As Ethel approaches the truth about the man who murdered her family, she’s discovering that the justice of the old West isn’t as glorious as fiction makes it out to be. Chas-ing one fickle lead after another has not paid off. No one can be trusted – a lesson she failed to learn from cowboy legend, Solomon Eaton. And Solomon is in his own heap of trouble, going up against a town full of men who will do anything to prevent him from saving his son.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The fifth and final issue of this series has Lonnie Nadler and Zac Thompson going for something that feels more honest and realistic in some ways but problematic in others. It’s the kind of conclusion where half of it has me thinking that’s probably what was really going on and understanding why Ethel went as she did here. Sami Kivela has put in some fantastic work with this series as it really gave me a strong early 70s vibe throughout it and captured that kind of raw and angry feeling that so many had. Was it just lead in the water for so many that turned them violent in addition to the drugs? That kind of feeling of psychopathy hits well here when dealing with Colt and his people and it just leaves you grimacing.
With Ethel having gone to where Colt and his ilk are, it doesn’t take long to come across the first guy playing a guitar on the porch. Gun in hand, seeing him and hearing him brings back a flood of memories that shows us exactly what went down in that hotel room a couple of years ago. Colt and his boys coming in for a party, hitting up the PCP, beating the crap out of her father, abusing her mother, accidentally shooting her brother in the back of the head. Leaving them all for dead and giving Ethel a chance to actually shoot Colt, knowing that she’d be too broken and frozen in the moment to actually do anything. It is, in its own way, nothing special. We’ve seen this violence before. It’s almost basic in a way. But it broke Ethel and set her on the stage to take revenge now because the system won’t deal in justice in her mind.
The present day is where things are a bit more frustrating. While she’s able to kill Benny easily enough, Colt and one of his guys end up outside and are able to kind of bravado their way into overpowering her combined with her own being wounded. It doesn’t take much before Ethel’s shot in the stomach and that leads to an argument between the men, which lets her basically burn the place down while they’re distracted. It’s frustrating because you get the sense that she’s feeling like she achieved something but as Chief Colls points out not long after she gets out of the hospital, Colt took all her money and got away. Even worse, the other guy was an undercover cop that got killed in this action and their chance at breaking a larger case has now fallen apart after two years of effort. It’s such a downer of an ending where it feels like things are even worse than when it started that it’s hard to know how to really feel.
In Summary:
With a sequel of some sort coming out in 2021, Undone by Blood isn’t technically finished but I get the sense that this storyline is. Which is fine. It was a decent one that played out more realistically in some aspects in the finale than I expected, though Ethel getting shot should have ended with her dead as well. The book was an interesting look at toxic and dangerous cultural elements of the 70s that built this massive mindshare of what crime was and is still utilized today to scare people and control them. I loved the artwork of the series and I liked the visuals of the flashback/book pieces that we got but that section never connected for me in terms of story itself. I’ll try whatever the sequel is out of curiosity but this is a strange tale that just reminds me that I’m so very glad that the 70s are long gone and over with.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: AfterShock Comics
Release Date: August 12th, 2020
MSRP: $3.99
