The Butcher’s Boy #3: Meat

Bad meat usually just makes people sick. In The Butcher’s Boy, the bad meat instead set out to actively murder people. The anticipation over whether or not that would happen has been almost unbearable. Now, can The Butcher’s Boy #3 deliver on the intense end and visceral horror that the previous issues promised.

Walker opens The Butcher’s Buy #3 with a flashback to Chris and Frankie’s first meeting two and a half months earlier before cutting back to the present where Chris has found Frankie’s decapitated corpse. But he doesn’t have a chance to mourn because Frankie grabs her own head, stands up, and starts vomiting maggots. The issue cuts back and forth between the present and flashbacks that flesh out the beginning of these characters’ friendships and the events that ultimately led to this horrific moment. And now a horrible fate may await them all if they can’t escape.

Clues were there all along. The Butcher’s Boy #3 doesn’t end with a twist, but it does end with a surprise. The dysfunctional friendships that at first seemed to be nothing more than character development for random people who fall into a horror story turn out to be the key to the entire series. The Butcher’s Boy #3 ties those clues together with flashbacks that make everything explicit before the final page. But that doesn’t make the revelation any less shocking.

The art team gets in on the clue dropping as well. A splotchy, unusually large tongue sticking out of an almost dislocated jaw is a late issue indicator of who or what is really behind what is happening. In an issue full of disturbing images, this one stands out because of simplicity.

That shock is intensified because the unbearable anticipation built up since The Butcher’s Boy #1’s opening pages pays off in a non-stop sprint to the finish in The Butcher’s Boy #3. This is the series’ greatest success. The story is engrossing and well told to be sure. But the series is a marvel in tension and pacing. Just as Walker created anticipation in the first two issues for an end that readers knew was coming, he creates further anticipation within this issue by taking the reader to the point of highest terror before cutting away to a calm flashback. The end feels close, but every time the reader thinks they’re finally getting there, Landry yanks the rug out from under them.

Greenwood finally gets to cut loose with the horror imagery. Decapitations, maggots falling out of mouths, giant toothy maws where torsos should be. The gruesome visuals in The Butcher’s Boy #3 blend monster imagery and body horror. Landry’s script calls for the characters to suffer in different ways, and Greenwood delivers each moment with equal skill. Whether it’s the side of beef with eyes and mouths or an explosion of blood upward from someone’s mouth like a fountain, the danger every character faces is distinct and easily competitive for the most disturbing image in the issue.

Simpson once again uses reds and purples to highlight the visual horror moments. But in The Butcher’s Boy #3, these are almost the rule rather than the exception. Every time something horrible happens, the rich colors of the real world are replaced with this simple color scheme. The terror feels like it’s taking place in another world. And in a way that might be true since the captions from the butcher’s boy describe a kind of transformational experience for both him and others around him.

Brosseau uses an almost identical red for the unintelligible dialogue bubbles spoken by the various tortured and monstrous humans.