Underwinter: Queen of Spirits

Underwinter

by Ray Fawkes

The Spirits of the Dead all face final judgment. Some know where they're going and some don't. But the Queen of Spirits waits with a promise: come to her and she will spare you your fate, for a price. Are you willing to pay?

Critically-acclaimed, groundbreaking writer/artist Ray Fawkes tells his most horrifying tale yet.

Genres: Comics, Horror, Graphic Novels

120 pages, Paperback

First published November 21, 2018

About the author

Ray Fawkes is the critically-acclaimed author of the comics and graphic novels Underwinter, Intersect, One Soul, The People Inside, The Spectral Engine, Possessions, and Junction True, as well as Batman: Eternal, Constantine, Justice League Dark, and Gotham by Midnight (DC), Wolverines (Marvel), Black Hammer '45 (Dark Horse), Jackpot! (AfterShock) and more. He is an Eisner, Harvey, and Shuster award nominee and a YALSA award winner.

Ray has been making comics for over 20 years, starting with and continuing the tradition of DIY fiction as well as working for many major comics publishers in the U.S. and Canada.

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

What happens when we die? None of the answers here are all that original - in lineaments, if not exact names, there are notions I recognise from fiction, from the Wraith RPG, and from religions millennia old. But the power of this isn't in innovative thanatology, it's in the execution, Ray Fawkes' haunting, sparse watercolours, his black windows hanging in the nothingness of blank paper and his world-weary, weighed-down ghosts.

[Ya Boi Be Reading]

What a weird ending to Underwinter. While I appreciate that Ray Fawkes used volume 2 and volume 3 to expand on the world of Underwinter and its theme of how humanity can come together and continue living in the face of hardships they feel to disconnected to each other. These volumes are fairly disconnected but still share enough points that I wouldn't warrant calling this a anthology series. It's in a weird middle place where the stories are connected and not in a way that is confusing and unsatisfying to readers.
Volume 3 has three different stories. You have two people from Emergency Services trying to save others from a calamity, three people stuck in the afterlife getting prepared to ask for a new lease on life quite literally too as they are asking to get revived and a witch preparing for a ceremony to end the suffering caused by the godlike beings, at least I think this last story was the most confusing. Most of the time I had no fucking clue what was going on with the witch storyline until the very end and even then I was like "Oh, that's it? Just more of the whole we have to come together and try to stop human suffering as a collective and she also brings people but to life to help them try and right their wrongs to stop more human suffering?" While the stories are interconnected they are so loosely connected you can treat them as individual stories being told all at once one after the other.
They all come together in the ending which as par for the course of Underwinter seemingly is confusing, poorly explained, and arrives at the message of who we are supposed to come together to fight against suffering. They do this through revealing a series of letter from a journal. It's a neat idea but it ends up feeling dry and boring. It's also confusing as fuck. It mentions how music is language and how we must use the natural universal language we all can use to fight the insurmountable odds of the suffering we all face (which are caused by godlike beings in Underwinter's case to give a face to this fact of life). I think there is in a sense a universal way of communication which we can use to unify and look for hope as a community of people so I like that message. But why talk about how music is language if music was only prominent in volume 1?
The art is still great. If you like volume one and two's art style and want to see more of it you'll definitely see it on cool display here with the reoccuring candle scenes in the Witch's storyline and the neat way they show the afterlife here (the afterlife is meant to be sorta blank in-between zone of life and death in Underwinter and the art style really sells it). I like the lack of detail watercolor approach. I don't think I'd want to see it all the time but it serves the dreary story of how godlike beings feed off of suffering and how they beyond our comprehension quite well. That being said the art is as its worst here for part of the issue. This is because the EMS storyline has them inside a crumbling building. I appreciate how they represent the obscured vision here but the artstyle is already purposefully lacking in detail. It makes it only worse .
Considering the ending, how these one has the most confusing storyline out of all of Underwinter and how Underwinter's main theme doesn't feel expanded enough considering this is another whole volume and the last one I dropped it a star. Out of all of Underwinter this is the one I can say I didn't really enjoy as just felt "Eh" and "What?" over.

[Paul Allard]

Third installment of supernatural comic collection - stylized and pretentious?

This third volume of Underwinter is slightly better than previous volumes but it does come across as a bit pretentious with its stylized artwork and deliberately unclear script. (Luckily I didn't pay for any of these volumes). The plot deals with a pair of ambulance crew with their trials and tribulations as well as three individuals in the afterlife searching for the Queen of Spirits. Hopefully someone will find this effort worthwhile.

[Damian Herde]

This is part three, yet story-wise, didn’t feel like the same universe as the previous volumes. Part one was using music as a weapon to prevent a god-like being from being born on Earth and destroying everything, and part two seemed linked through characters who had knowledge of those events. This was following some ghosts drifting around doing ghost stuff, like pondering their lives and where they go next.

There was something about a ghost witch, and an explosion that created a heap of ghosts in one hit, and an enemy of humans. Meanwhile two paramedics scrambled through rubble trying to find survivors. That’s about as much as I could pull from it.

The watercolour art is beautiful, but was also murky and didn’t add to the clarity of the narrative. The rear-cover quote saying Lovecraft would be proud is extremely misleading and has zero relevance to this ghost story.

[Johan]

WTH? I can't even!

[Chad]

Follows two paramedics as they try and help the people in a building where a bomb went off. Meanwhile the dead are trying to decide to go meet this death creature for help or not. Lots of flowery language that doesn't say anything. Both not very original nor well told. About exactly what I'd expect from Ray Fawkes.