Wow. Locke & Key may not be the most regular book on the shelf, but when it delivers, it packs a punch. Clockworks has been the most revealing of the five L&K minis and its final issue should answer enough of your questions to keep you at least partially satisfied until this fall.
Here’s the official description from IDW:
As a storm thunders up the coast to Lovecraft, Massachusetts, the Keepers of the Keys face Dodge a final time, under three hundred feet of stone, in the darkness before the Black Door. Here, water will mix with blood and The Drowning Cave will become a colossal grave, in the final issue of the CLOCKWORKS storyline.
One of my favorite themes Stephen King consistently employs in his work is the sense of inevitability. He’s not afraid to tell you early on how things will turn out; then you get to read along, knowing who’s going to die, but powerless to stop it. In Clockworks, Joe Hill borrowed his father’s technique to devastating effect. We’ve known the final fates of Rendell Locke and his friends for a while now, but Hill has spent several issues making us care about them. Here, now, in issue 6, he rips them all to shreds.
If there’s one problem with Hill’s writing in this issue, it’s that too much happens. Developments come so quickly that the reader often has to infer what happens between panels. It’s not bad enough to make the book unreadable, but it definitely pulled me out of the story several times.
Gabriel Rodriguez is also in top form. The realism he brings to such a fantastical series is always amazing. His facial work seems even more accomplished than usual this issue, something I would have thought was impossible. It’s also obvious that he had a lot of fun drawing this issue, with the abundance of thoughts and memories from the Head Key and shadows from the crown.
Now, I saved the best news for last: the ads at the back of the book reveal two new Locke & Key projects coming out later this year. Locke & Key: Grindhouse is scheduled for this August and Locke & Key: Omega is due sometime in the fall. According to IDW’s solicits, Omega is the final L&K storyline, which makes me think Grindhouse is a one-shot. Guess we’ll find out in the coming months. In the meantime, I’m gonna read Clockworks #6 again.
Review: 4.5/5
S#*! TALKING CENTRAL