The Displaced #4: The Gut Punch

What kind of life can you have when no one remembers you? No job. No friends. No future. The Displaced #4 puts Oshawa’s citizens under the pressure of that question more than ever before. The series’ creative team delivers the most intense issue yet.

Oshawa’s disappearance is two months past when The Displaced #4 begins. Tavis and his friends have split off the main group and continue to rob stores for money and supplies. Gabby’s struggle to move past the loss of her family is growing worse. She can’t clearly remember her baby’s face anymore. Doug and Dale, not believing that they’ll vanish if they’re alone, go off on their own, determined to prove Emmett wrong. The group of survivors is falling apart and there may not be hope for any of them.

The Displaced #4 is driven entirely by emotion. A pervasive sadness, even depression, hangs over the whole issue. The issue’s dialogue certainly drives this. But contributing in no small way to this is Cunniffe’s coloring which never lets up when it comes to a truly oppressive nighttime, rain soaked setting.

The plot, at least for this issue, morphs entirely into tracking the survivors readers have come to know the best. By the fourth page, it feels inevitable that not all the survivors will make it out of the issue. It’s obvious as the issue goes on why Harold was alone–a life of being forced to stay together and never being remembered by anyone is slowly eroding these people’s ability and will to go on. In more ways than one, no one here has a future.

The Displaced encourages readers’ thoughts of the necessity and nature of human connection. The survivors’ connection to the larger world is fleeting and insubstantial. They can survive so long as they’re together, but they can’t go further in life. They are frozen in place. It’s easy to see The Displaced #4 as arguing against isolation and mere survival despite the potential consequences. Whether Brisson is intentionally exploring this theme or not, the series provides a starting point from which to consider it.

The Displaced #4 maintains the same heavy focus on Gabby that has defined much of the series to this point. Hers is the most moving story and the art is a significant reason why. During her scene with Emmett, Casalanguida draws Gabby’s eye line in almost every direction but him as they talk. Every image of her conveys depression and defeatism. Brisson’s dialogue establishes that Gabby, as opposed to everyone else, is concerned with what she lost rather than her own survival. But no dialogue could convey her emotions as quickly and powerfully as the art. And indeed, Gabby’s sequences going into the end of the issue are heartrending thanks to Casalanguida’s work.

The final pages intercut between different characters in different locations as the issue barrels toward the end. Brisson’s script may have called for this setup, but Casalanguida’s art infuses it with urgency that the script couldn’t convey on its own.

Otsmane-Elhaou uses a vaguely scribbled look for dialogue bubbles any time a character seems uncertain or frightened. It resembles the squiggles of a character vanishing, and provides an interesting visual connection to the scared isolation of those characters as they fade away.