Albert Einstein had shown various possibilities of time travel using his theory of relativity, this became a popular motif in literature and film in the 20th century. The time travel motif has also been taken up again and again in comics, for example in the ingeniously bizarre superhero satire The Umbrella Academy by Gerard Way and Daniel Ba, in which the protagonists’ jumping back and forth between time planes causes numerous catastrophes, but ultimately also brings about salvation from the total apocalypse. The series was colored by multiple Eisner Award winner Dave Stewart, who – literally – had a hand in a recent sensational comic series.
In Gideon Falls by Jeff Lemire (author), Andrea Sorrentino (artist) and Dave Stewart, the possibility of time travel also proves to be a flirt with nothingness, only that it is much darker here and humorous moments tend to remain the exception. The series, which opened in 2018, received the renowned Eisner Award twice (2019, 2020), which is comparable to the Academy Award (“Oscar”), as well as a lot of praise from comic fans and the trade press. With the publication of the last volume in a German translation by Splitter-Verlag, a summary should now be drawn here.
The story begins with the appearance of a mysterious black barn in a town called Gideon Falls, in two ways: In a rural version of Gideon Falls, Father Wilfred, who has just been appointed to the vicarage there, finds a horribly mauled corpse in an open field, immediately after the ominous barn appeared to him at this point. Since he is initially suspected of murder himself, he becomes increasingly involved in efforts to clear up the crime, which appears to be connected to a traumatic event for the residents of the little town that occurred further in the past. In a second, metropolitan version by Gideon Falls, it is a (seemingly) schizophrenic young man who has the image of the black barn appearing in his dreams and searching for its ruins in the city’s garbage becomes an obsessive passion. Even if the storylines of the two characters are initially led side by side in parallel montage, it quickly becomes clear that their paths will soon have to cross.
The fact that this man from the big city does not leave the house without an FFP2 mask gave the series an iconic topicality, which is probably purely coincidental. After all, the first issues appeared long before the outbreak of the corona pandemic. Nevertheless, the images of Norton Sinclair (that’s what the man calls himself at first) and later other characters with professional nose masks touch sensitively the nerves of the readers* who are on edge in this regard. Because what Sinclair probably designed simply as an external characteristic of his obsessions and delusions, lets the horror for the readers of Gideon Falls begin where the comic makers could not actually have had it in mind. In any case, the series is not made for eerie escapism, too many other current references run through the work: there is (at least at the beginning) the contrast between town and country in both versions of Gideon Falls, which creates a fundamental social conflict line of the present There is the obsessive search for the reality behind reality, as expressed in delusions and belief in conspiracies, and there is (at a later point in time) the disintegration of all order together with a multiplication of realities.
In order not to be misunderstood: The comic series has nothing to do with the socially critical claims of Jonathan Hickman’s thriller series Black Monday Murders or the sociologically interested questions of social organization, distribution of power and the problem of radical otherness in Robert Kirkmans The Walking Dead, even if it may seem so, at least in the exposition. The outstanding quality of Gideon Falls is based rather on the compositional and visual realization of the story. Lemire’s storytelling style is subtle, intricate, layered, and full of intertextual references. He is able to create tension, fear and horror as well as contemplatively ponder the “nature” of evil. The visual design of the comic by Andrea Sorrentino is also more than original, who is able to functionalize the page architecture of the comic in an unconventional way, both rhetorically and productively. Apart from that, his dark, neo-realistic style of drawing combined with Dave Stewart’s expressive color scheme is probably the ultimately decisive aesthetic moment that gives Lemire’s story the appropriate atmospheric depth.
As already mentioned, one possible function of the horror genre – to draw a complex picture of society in which the repressed traumas of the past and present are embodied by monsters and revenants – is carried out Gideon Falls only partly fulfilled. Nevertheless, at the latest when the protagonists enter the barn, a journey begins that confronts us with the most horrific and raises the question of the origin of evil as well as the possibility of its containment. The fact that no single person can succeed here, but is only thanks to the cooperation of a solidary community, is already a socio-political statement in today’s times.
Link to the series at Splitter-Verlag (German)
Link to the original issues of the publisher Image Comics (English)