A geologist visits a distant island with a lighthouse to investigate a mysterious sinkhole that doesn’t appear to have a bottom. What lies at the end of all that darkness… ?
Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino have teamed up yet again for an ambitious new project: a shared horror universe called The Bone Orchard Mythos. I saw a double-page ad at the end of Primordial, their most recent collab, which I think listed five titles that are scheduled for this series, three of which are coming out this year alone! These two are nothing if not workhorses.
The Passageway is the first book in the series and, as often seems to be the case with Lemire/Sorrentino comics, it’s right purty but not much else.
The characters are so lightly written they may as well be ciphers. There’s the creepy lighthouse lady who clearly knows more than she’s letting on, the Canadian geologist who’s just A Guy but with disturbing dreams about his mother for some reason. We learn so little about the geologist that the nightmare flashbacks don’t really mean anything to the reader.
Sorrentino’s art though is fantastic. He captures the eerie isolation of the lighthouse island beautifully and, without giving anything away, the imagery of what’s at the bottom of the well is really striking and memorable. I never tend to have anything bad to say about this artist’s work and that remains the case here.
There are more questions than answers in the story, which is to be expected from a first book in a series, but the effect is still unsatisfying. It’s not the most impressive of stories - it amounts to a bunch of creepy images, some horror cliches and little else - but I’m at least intrigued enough to want to see where the Boner Orchard is headed. As it is, The Passageway is an inauspicious start to this new horror title.
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