to the maybe 3 people that gaf may i present the crackship of unicron trilogy Rodimus x idw Fortress Maximus--wait- no, wait, please come back i have reasons--
Over the past the week I read Locke & Key: The Golden Age written by Joe Hill with art by Gabriel Rodriguez and colors by Jay Fotos. This is my attempt both to be time (it coincides twitch the week that the final season of the Netflix’s Locke & Key season dropped) and autobiographical as L&K is one of the series that I first read when I decided to get back into reading comics. It was something of an immediate love and if I ever get back to re-reading (lol) it is something I intend to re-read. Also this involved the cross over with The Sandman! My original loving comic book introduction!
While I was pretty excited when the Locke & Key/Sandman crossover was announced, I decided not to buy the individual issues, partially because of how disappointed I was by the recent “Dog Days” one shot. Now that I have read it, I am glad I waited. The only story in the collection I read before was “Small World” a light hearted story about the Locke family in the second decade of the twentieth century and how dangerous children being in charge of the doll house key can be. It’s fun with some light scares. The book gets progressively darker in the next couple of stories, “Open the Moon” and “…In Pale Battalions Go…” and both of these are essential to setting up the Sandman crossover, “Hell & Gone”.
First off everything in this collection is better than the “Dog Days” one shot. “Open the Moon” is a short about the early death of Ian Locke, that is framed as taking him directly to Heaven in a hot air balloon and leaving him there. As a character, Ian is kind of unmemorable. But as an example of how the family living with tragedy despite the magic of their keys.
“…In Pale Battalions Go…” flips that formula where the tragedy is caused by misuse/abuse of the keys. It is set during the early months of World War one where the John Locke uses the keys to the enlist with the Allies before he was of age (and before the USA joined and as a combat aid. Even before doing this he was using the music box key to dangerously manipulate his mother. Naturally this combination leads to a lot of death. Hence why in “Hell & Gone” John’s twins sister, Mary decides to visit Hell. The process to get there involves contacting Roderick Burgess while he is holding Dream captive, and using his tools visit the Dreaming and learn how to get to Hell. As this plot requires Mary to see the captive Dream and not help him, as well as being single-mindedly driven, it makes sense that at one point she referent to herself as a bitch. But she’s also the best. Not exactly selfless, but able to recognize the needs of others and her personal limitations. She doesn’t so much end the tragedy as soften it, after all in these stories we are all ultimately under Destiny’s designs. (Destiny of the Endless is not mentioned in this story, but wraps up with some fated reveals.)
I don’t want to spoil too much. In the recent past I have brought up how much I like the are of Rodriguez. In particular I like the way he makes the Locke family look related, the sense of consistency he brings to the environment, how it’s all clean and easy too read, but not at the expense of the magical things depicted. His work is very different than the Sandman artists (Sam Keith, Mike Dringenberg and Kelley Jones primarily) who depicted Hell in the original run. But it is all recognizable. It looked kind of odd, but it worked. I am delighted by how it worked.
