News From The Fallout #6: A Strange Program

It was writer Chris Condon’s work on That Texas Blood (World’s biggest That Texas Blood fan, here. PSA: If you’ve yet to read it, please do yourself a favor. It’s incredible.) which led me to News From The Fallout – that, and the fact that it pretty much hits all the right buttons for me, story-wise. A military experiment gone horribly awry. A group of normal people holed-up in an unassuming locale, banding together to face an unknown evil. Zombie-like creatures whose heads explode, spreading plumes of red ash like dandelion seeds, infecting any living thing unlucky enough to find themselves in their path.

I came to News From The Fallout just prior to the release of its final chapter, “Darkness Everywhere,” and I’m glad that I did. I think this series really lends itself to that kind of breathless, all-in-one-go reading experience. Fallout is relentlessly paced, with Condon’s beautiful yet bluntly colloquial dialogue and Jeffrey Alan Love’s muscular, minimalistic art style driving the story like an assault on the reader – beginning with a terrifying siege, and culminating in a series of standoffs and skin-of-their-teeth getaways from our ever-dwindling cast of characters. Though Fallout is a relatively brisk read, I could easily see it becoming a perennial classic for me – one of those books I return to over and over again throughout the years, poring over Love’s hauntingly spare visuals. 

Fallout features some of the most singular, starkly rendered artwork I’ve ever seen in the medium of comics, with characters’ silhouettes often serving as their only individuating characteristics. Love somehow manages this without ever disorienting or confusing the reader – except, of course, for when the narrative calls for it. However, none of this would work if Condon’s character writing wasn’t so spot-on – we don’t necessarily need to be able to tell each character apart visually at any given moment, since Condon’s dialogue is so distinctly written from character-to-character. 

There is an extended, multi-page sequence in this final issue that beautifully demonstrates this holistic approach to writing and visuals – including, significantly, the design work and lettering (Michael Tivey and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, respectively), which are also top-notch – wherein the last living members of the group make their way through a maze of abandoned mining tunnels in pitch darkness, pierced suddenly by blindingly-bright muzzle-flares.

This approach works beautifully as it pertains to the series’ more horrific elements, as well, allowing the reader to fill in some of the gorier details in their mind, wielding the power of the unknown to great effect. By forcing the reader to use their imagination, they are implicated in the proceedings as an active participant, making the horror more immediate, more intense, more immersive. For this reason, the most frightening images in News From The Fallout are often those that lean more toward the uncanny, aiming to unsettle rather than outright shock or terrify.

For example, the shadowy figures of the undead cresting blasted, apocalyptic hill-tops in the distance… slowly, relentlessly descending upon our doomed hero…