Meanwhile, Fairbairn’s colors delineate an oppressive environment where danger seems to be looming around every corner, even in wide open spaces.Ī look at an extra-dimensional cityscape. For example, an urban landscape where the store sign lettering is sometimes upside down, or inverted into a mirror-image, or simply gibberish, suggests that the action is not occurring in the real world.
Burnham’s pencils are richly textured and detailed, with subtle components that refer to elements of the plot. In typical Morrison fashion, the language is crisp, clear, and sometimes filthy, without overly verbose characters pontificating on their own importance. This is definitely NOT a book you only read once, and it is nihilistic, irreverent and humorous. Even in the face of utter confusion, the book is hard to put down because it pushes the reader to try and figure out what is going on, and just when you think you have a handle on the plot, it adds another layer to the storyline. Nameless is one of the most frustrating books I have ever encountered, and that is a good thing (in this case). Once the chase is done, Nameless is recruited by the powerful secret organization in order to be shot into space and save the Earth from the incoming asteroid. This part of the book is fragmented (both visually and textually) and somewhat hard to follow, while it simultaneously draws the reader in. The reader spends a significant portion of the book following Nameless as he is being chased by the Veiled Woman and her fish-headed minions in a convoluted race to obtain something called a Dream Key. Nameless is the element that interconnects all the other ones in this book.
Finally, there is the eponymous protagonist of the book, Nameless, a self-described “expert on the occult” with a dark past (not John Constantine), who uses that name as a way of avoiding anyone from having any power over him. We also have an Illuminati-like group of powerful and influential people who have a secret: a fourteen-mile long, six-mile wide asteroid is on a collision course with earth. Then a mysterious woman wearing a veil and her minions (not the cute yellow ones) hunt people in their dreams, à la Freddy Krueger. In issue one, titled “Shit Rains Down,” we have a horrific murder/suicide with an astronomer that has killed his family (by making his wife and kids drink bleach) and then has hanged himself (with nothing less than barbed wire). Image Comics’ six-issue miniseries Nameless, written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Chris Burnham and Nathan Fairbairn, presents the reader with a complex yet entertaining storyline formed by the intersection of a number of familiar elements from the horror genre. This week’s offering comes from the often-neglected world of horror comics.
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