Bog Bodies is due out April 22, 2020. — **Bog Bodies** is due out April 22, 2020.

By Hussein Wasiti — Declan Shalvey has slowly morphed into a jack-of-all-trades over the course of the past couple of years. He’s done everything from draw interiors, providing covers and variant covers, as well as writing his own comics. Savage Town, his first foray into writing for the OGN format, was an interesting story but something about the cultural uniqueness of the comic held it back from being an accessible, evergreen crime story. His second OGN, Bog Bodies with artist Gavin Fullerton, colorist Rebecca Nalty, and letterer Clayton Cowles, is instantly more accessible, more human, and provides a tragic tale of redemption set against the moonlit backdrop of rural Ireland.

There’s a throughline that can be found in Savage Town and Bog Bodies, and it’s not that they’re Ireland-set crime stories. Shalvey has rather impressively worked with local artists, Philip Barrett for the former and now Fullerton. If anything, that says more about Shalvey’s sensibilities as a person than it does as a creator; he could definitely move more copies if he drew the thing, but his willingness to give rise to new artists is something I can get behind.

Fullerton is given a pretty heavy task here. Save for two pages, the entire story takes place at night so there’s not much in the way of backgrounds or environments for Fullerton to take advantage of and help tell the story. It’s supremely character-focused, with a lot of negative space that denotes the vast emptiness the characters have found themselves in. It helps that all of his characters are hyper-expressive and bring life to every page. There’s a lot of white, blue, and black that predominantly makes up the colour palette of the book, which makes it all the more striking when red enters the picture. Surprise, some blood appears in a crime story!

Overall I think Fullerton did a fantastic job but there are definitely moments, especially near the end of the story, which weren’t executed perfectly. A key scene near the end was more informed by the page that came after it rather than the page itself, due to a few vague panels and some splotchy character work.

As for the plot that Shalvey cooked up, it’s a more somber and darker In Bruges; I hate to make those kinds of comparisons but sometimes they help. The story focuses on Killian, a young criminal who made a mistake and has to pay the price. Like I mentioned earlier, redemption plays a key theme here and by the time I put the book down, I smelt some deep religious commentary cooking under the surface, especially when it comes to the boss who puts the narrative into motion. A boss who is never seen but signs off on deaths without any logic and who is referred to at one point as “the big guy.” There’s an inevitability and tragedy to the violence that I don’t think I was ready for in my first reading, and I suspect the ending will be a sticking point for a lot of people. Shalvey doesn’t have all the answers for us, and that’s okay, but I felt a disconnect between the straight-forward narrative of the crime story as it relates to some elements of the story near the end which I’m not terribly sure actually happened or not.

This is well worth checking out. This is a clear upgrade for Shalvey; this may be the best thing he’s written so far, and he’s got a fantastic cartoonist in Fullerton by his side. Save for a few quibbles, the story is pretty satisfying and unique among crime comics.

Bog Bodies
Writer: Declan Shalvey
Artist: Gavin Fullerton
Colorist: Rebecca Nalty
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Publisher: Image Comics
Solicit: An Irish gangster on the run after a job gone wrong stumbles upon a young woman lost in the Dublin mountains. Injured and unarmed, the unlikely pair must try to evade their pursuers and survive the desolate bog that has served as a burial ground for unspeakable murder throughout history.
Release Date: April 22, 2020

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Hussein Wasiti is a history undergraduate with an intense passion for comics. He is a staff writer on The Beat and a contributor to Comics Bookcase. You can find him on Twitter as bullthesis. He lives in Toronto with his hordes of comics.