Blow Away #3: Alone in a Storm

Was there a murder on top of a mountain? Brynne is convinced that there was. Blow Away operated as a vague crime story for the first two issues, focusing on Brynne as an amateur investigator struggling against an unhelpful local population. Blow Away #3 plants the series firmly in an unexpected genre and seeks to tighten the story up.

Brynne’s expedition in Pang has extended to 49 days in Blow Away #3. Her amateur investigation consumes more and more of her time, especially as a storm threatens to snow her in. Sheriff Ayek is inserting herself in Brynne’s activities, taking copies of everything she has and warning Brynne away from the situation. Ultimately Brynne decides that the true answers can only be found on top of the mountain.

Blow Away #3 is more thriller than anything else. The amateur investigator crime fiction element remains as Brynne continues to pursue what happened on the top of the mountain. But with her last real lifeline, the sheriff, becoming more of an antagonist in her eyes, the issue concentrates on Brynne’s isolation and obsession. Thompson has twisted Brynne to the point that solving the case for its own sake no longer feels like the goal. Rather, Brynne seems to primarily care that she’s the one to solve the case.

The tension in Blow Away #3 shifts as a result of Brynne’s heightened emotions. It’s less about what happened to the climbers now and much more about the lengths to which Brynne is going to solve the mystery. Brynne starts slipping toward being an unreliable narrator in the sense that while the video footage provides objective information, the reader’s understanding of it is being filtered through Brynne’s interpretation. Can anything she thinks she discovers be trusted anymore?

Near the issue end, Thompson writes, and Izzo very successfully executes, a nine grid panel that is read from the bottom left upward, snaking across the page. A rope tracks from the final panel of the previous page to the unconventional first panel of the next, indicating how the page should be read. The progression workd very well, and the story that it told in that nine panel grid is easy to follow. The rope extendig from the previous page also works as an unintentional reminder to pay attention to the art in a visual medium at least much as the text.

Sheriff Ayek takes on an almost sinister appearance in Blow Away #3. Izzo pushed the sheriff right up to that line when she was introduced in the previous issue. He keeps that same sensibility here as he once again draws the sheriff’s eyes narrow, and now frequently has her eyelines avoid looking directly at Brynne. Thompson’s dialogue straddles a line of being specifically adversarial with Brynne versus merely wanting a visitor playing amateur detective out of the way. Izzo’s art reinforces the former more so than the latter but not so much that it precludes the latter. There is enough room in Izzo’s depiction of the sheriff for interpretation, and that further plays into how the reader approaches Brynne and her investigation.

Izzo and Segala’s work combines effectively to create the appearance of the storm that is further isolating Brynne. They’ve repeatedly created the white out conditions that obscure Brynne’s footage of exactly what happened between the two mountain climbers. In Blow Away #3 a storm settles over the town of Pang. Lines and small bits of snow do a good job communicating the wind, and the storm’s bright white outdoors adds to the overall feeling of cold.

Late in the issue, when Brynne is out in the worst of the wind and the snow, Hopkins uses the same white as the surrounding storm for the sound effects. Outlined just enough by gray and light blue, the letters are just legible enough. The sound effects don’t interfere with the atmosphere created by Izzo and Segala–if anything, they reinforce it.