Without Fear

I love GREEN WAKE. And I miss it.

The emotional and terrific journey though the destructive and desolate town of Green Wake from Riley Rossmo and Kurtis J Wiebe was near on perfection. Disgusting visuals and heartbreaking character moments filled every issue across a run cut far too short.

This book hit me right in the guts both because it is devastatingly well made but also because it sits in a zone of narrative I always enjoy, a character study of how hard we can hurt.
Wiebe channelled the shards of his broken heart into each page and Rossmo knows how to draw a world as strange and grotesque as we feel it is as it closes in on us daily. The pairing between these two gentleman was a comic journey of how to deal with grief and how our lives forever cycle through our worst moments. Some days we are on the other side of the sun from our abyssal souls and some days we end up right back where we started.
The tale of Morley Mack trying to get past the death of his wife is a brutal dissection of how we get dragged down, and then how we keep swimming south. And while sales flagged and the series was cut short at 10 issues, the narrative was brought to a completely satisfying conclusion that reminds me of THE DARK TOWER in precision and inevitability.
I would love to see this series brought back because an emotional horror tale done well is a rare thing that should be cared for and beloved by many, and certainly more than got into it the first time. I think a new series that inspects the town of Green Wake in a DMZ style structure of floating around the inhabitants and looking into intriguing corners would suit this landscape perfectly. One-shots, short arcs of three issues, a vast array of broken characters and a deep noir backdrop on which to hang them and break them is exactly the sort of comic I want to read.
For now, you can buy the issues digitally, or the trades online or at your LCS, and I even wrote a one-shot set around Green Wake which you might well dig.
I miss having my heart broken with each issue. I miss Green Wake.