Skinbreaker #3: Hold Your Values Close

The third issue of Skinbreaker is about the decay of strength even while wits remain and the fear that what you’ve created will fail to outlive you. Anok’s time as chieftain (which began in last month’s Skinbreaker #2) has clearly been the golden age of his people, yet there is still resistance from the brutish Thul and now even Thul’s son, who oppose our protagonist. But all of this is old news; we saw it last issue. So what does the third issue do differently?

For starters, instead of showing Anok’s sheer competence like the previous two issues, Skinbreaker #3 shows us the boundary of his limitations. He’s still, well, not human, but whatever their species is called. That means he ages and with age, grows weak and weary of a world that has been run on blood and the strength to draw it for generations. Back in issue one, Anok’s main opposition was the pragmatism of his aging but kind father, who saw his strength but refused to see his own. While in issue two, the “antagonist” was the seeming force of nature that is, or rather was, the old tribal ways of their people. The third issue turns the ravages of time into its main antagonist. Paired with the harshness of a world where invention and innovation are seen as foolish endeavors, Robert Kirkman has created a persistent opposition to what is “right” that rings like a tuning fork for the story through all three issues so far.

It may seem silly that wanting to improve lives would be met with such pushback, especially when it costs nothing, right? Well, that’s not how Thul, Anok’s main dissenter and part-time heckler, sees it. He doesn’t enjoy being a jerk; he just doesn’t believe that the benefits outweigh what would be lost. And that is the strength of resistance. That fortitude is found in our own world, like with diamonds, which cannot exist without extreme pressures. Anok, however, knows better. Because he understands: what good are diamonds when the people break under the pressure?

David Finch has turned comic books into paintings with the first three of Skinbreaker’s eight-issue lifespan. With double-spread pages and hundreds of intricate details, such as the recurring cave symbols, the exact icons on Enor’s grave, which we saw for the first time in Issue #2, and much more. Annalisa Leoni has a colossal task, coloring artwork with so much detail packed in. But they rise to the task with flickering orange campfires that cast shade across character faces and the purple-pink sheen of the titular Skinbreaker under moonlight.

By the end of issue #3 I had two main takeaways. The first was that Kirkman’s world is able to feel alive because of the realistic actions and reactions of the characters; of course, the great art also helps. The second, however, was that we still haven’t learned anything as readers about the world. Despite how “alive” it feels, we still don’t know what the Skinbreaker is or much beyond the village of the tribe and the lush forest that surrounds it. In a way this is a strength, as it makes the world feel primitive and unknowable, which could be exactly what its inhabitants feel. On the other hand, the mystique makes the conflict feel small in some places and the pacing slower than most readers would expect.