Entry Portal: Locke & Key: Omega #2 Review

I hadn’t read any of Locke & Key, written by Joe Hill and drawn by Gabriel Rodriguez, until the Grindhouse one-shot came out back in September. At the time, I told myself that I hadn’t tried it because the word was it had a bunch of backstory and mythology crossing four already-released trade paperbacks worth of material, and between my heavy take of weekly comics and trying to run a comics Web site, I simply didn’t have the time or energy to throw myself into a deep horror tale that, based on titles alone, looked like another Lovecraft knockoff – sure, I loves me some Lovecraftian stories, but I think I’ve established I have little patience for bad ones. So why run the risk?

That was the reason that I told myself. Turns out the real reason I wasn’t reading Locke & Key is because I was a fucking idiot.

Locke & Key is a spectacular horror story, one that covers twenty years and more of mythology, yes, but which focuses on a small group of well-rounded characters in a limited, generally familiar setting – you know, minus the weird house and its funky magic keys. It has Lovecraftian elements, yes, but it also has so much more, and by keeping the people affected down to a small group, it accentuates the danger by making it easy to empathize with those in the thick of it. Yes, Locke & Key is all one big six-volume story (other than that Grindhouse one-shot), and yes, because of that, it is difficult to just grab an issue to understand who people are and what is happening to them, but four of those volumes are available in affordable trade paperback, with the fifth just out in hardcover… and if you’re anything like me, by the time you finish the fourth book, you’ll happily drop the extra few bucks to get the fifth right fucking now.

The sixth and final Locke & Key volume, Omega, is being released in normal comic book form right now; the second issue dropped on Wednesday. And while I have been digging it, I didn’t review the last month’s first issue because it is a late chapter in one big story. Which meant that if you hadn’t read any of the earlier issues, there wasn’t a hope in hell that a new reader would know what the hell was going on or why. And the same is true for this week’s second issue, but I’m going to review and recommend it anyway, even for new readers. Because even though new readers won’t know who the punk kid in the wedding dress is, or why there’s a naked child ghost wandering around with no wang, or if the black woman muttering “White. Stop. Dodge” is in the mental hospital due to a hideous Bombardment accident, I can guarantee they will lock onto the character of Rufus Whedon. And if the heart and cleverness with which Hill has embued this character doesn’t give you faith that maybe it’s worth starting Locke & Key from the beginning to see what he’s done with these other people you don’t know? Maybe comics really aren’t the hobby for you.

I’m not going to spend too much time recapping the plot, because again: this is simply a chapter in one long story, so to explain who everyone is and why they’re where they are would take me until New Year’s Eve, and I plan to drink to serious excess that day. We’ll leave it with the fact that the bad guy, Dodge, has taken control of Bode, the youngest Locke child’s, body, leaving the real Bode as a disembodied spirit that only Rufus, a child with some form of cognitive disability, can see. So Rufus attacks Bode’s body, which does not sit well with the rest of the family, nor the local authorities. Physically, Rufus is taken to a mental hospital, but emotionally, he has been taken captive by Nazis, accompanied only by killer military robot Mayhemi (in reality, a robot action figure), and must figure out a way to escape custody, sneak back behind enemy lines like a good soldier, and take out the enemy before he has a chance to raise an army.

I’m going to pretend that you are a new reader of Locke & Key, and therefore I’m going to tell you to ignore the kid in the A’s cap and the teenager in the dress and Spider Jerusalem in the wedding dress. Sure, once you get up to speed you’ll know them, and what they’re doing will have some emotional weight, but for right now, as a newbie, all you need to know is that they are going to prom, and bad guy Dodge is planning some bad shit for the prom. So know that time is limited, which should help add some stakes to what Rufus is going through… and Goddamn, does Hill do one hell of a job with Rufus.

We have seen Rufus before, and we have seen his fantasy life of military adventures with his action figures. And as a character seen as and referred to by many characters as a “retard,” he has seen more than anyone thinks, simply by nature of people thinking he won’t understand what he’s witnessing. But in this issue, Hill really puts us into Rufus’s head. We see some of the things he has been through, and we see that, despite the depth of his fantasy life (in which he sees himself as a battle-scarred, jacked gyrene), he understands the nature of reality. He knows that he’s slower than most people, and he knows that he has problems functioning in the real world, and we see that that scares him… but Hill also demonstrates that Rufus’s fantasy life can also act as a reality filter that helps Rufus function better. Sure, he’s talking to an action figure that, on some level, he thinks is real, but talking things through with the robot also lead him to do some really clever things… and when you see why he talks to the robot, and who he associates Mayhemi with, and why that brings him confidence, it’ll break your Goddamned heart.

In its own way, despite being a chapter in a longer story, Locke & Key: Omega #2 is a one-and-done about this one character. You don’t need to know what the danger is or what has brought everyone to this point; you can simply read about this one kid who’s in over his head, and in 22 pages, Hill will make you know him, care about him, and root for him, despite not necessarily knowing what has brought him, or us, here. It is great character writing, and worth the price of admission even if you’re brand new to the book.

And Gabriel Rodriguez’s art helps sell the entire thing. He draws things in a realistic style, including detailed backgrounds, with normal looking figures and detailed – highly detailed – facial expressions. You can tell each characters emotions just by the looks on their faces… except for Rufus. Rufus, in the real world, has kind of a blank expression. However, when he sees himself as a soldier, there is just slightly more obvious emotion. Not a huge difference, but just enough that you can tell he feels more alive when he’s in his own world. It’s subtle, but it’s enough to show the difference between his two states, without being so different it seems that he is completely disconnected from reality. The overall effect is one that connects everything to the real, which helps sell the situations. And even in scenes of Rufus’s fantasy world (including Nazi Crocodile soldiers), he then matches the weird scene with the reality in subsequent panels, demonstrating how Rufus is able to function in his made-up world. Simply put: it’s good art for this kind of story.

For those of us who have read Locke & Key all the way through, this is a solid issue that advances the plot, showing just how close Dodge is to success in using the Omega Key, the danger that Kinsey, Bode and Tyler are unknowingly in, and how desperate things have become given that their only hope seems to be a slow kid who they will call the cops on as an attempted murderer if he even manages to get back in time to try to do something. But even for a new reader, you’ll get a compelling character study of a slow kid with a lot of guts, in over his head but trying his best to do something right and good, facing impossible odds, for reasons that anyone could empathize with. So give Locke & Key: Omega #2 a shot, even sight unseen. And when you’re done, understand that Hill has paid the same attention to every single character you see in this book over the course of the story’s run, and go back and give the first trade, Welcome to Lovecraft, a shot.