Written By: Gail Simone
Art By: Jon Davis-Hunt, Todd
Klein
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: December 16, 2015
I Only Have Eyes For You
*Non-Spoilers and Score At
The Bottom*
Aversion therapy is a
commonly practiced technique wherein the patient is exposed to the things they
fear until their anxiety has passed, e.g. someone afraid of fire will be made
to sit near open flame until they can bear it. The process can be fast or it
can take several escalating sessions, but the lesson is that our fears, once
faced, are baseless. But that isn’t quite true, is it? Fire does burn, doesn’t it? Perhaps there are
things that we fear which should not be examined too closely or for too long,
lest that understanding deepens our horror. Because as we’re going to learn in Clean Room #3, sometimes when you go to
those darkened corners of your mind, creepy things can come back with you.
Let’s expose our nightmares together, shall we? Read on!
Explain It!:
Astrid Mueller’s Clean
Room, the multi-sensory chamber she uses to divest people of their obsessive
compulsive disorders, is open for business, and Ms. Mueller herself is
attending to subject Joe Wei. His problem is that he will only take seventy-one
steps per day—after that, he won’t let his feet touch the ground—because he
believes that angels reside in the ground beneath us and scream as we step upon
their faces. Or something like that. Point is, this guy has troubles that caused his marriage to end. You might think the wife lacked understanding, until you
realize that her husband pretty much walked to the corner and back and then had
to spend every day sitting with his feet hovering off the ground, or lying
down. Which, come to think of it, is more or less how I live my life.
While this is happening,
we see some guy that looks like a Dominos Pizza delivery guy breaking into
muckraking, vengeful reporter Chloe Pierce’s house by busting the front door
into smithereens. Chloe Pierce…why is that name familiar? Oh yeah, she was the
protagonist in the last two issues of Clean
Room, though now she seems sort of deflated by her recent experience with
Astrid. We see her getting some gas and going to pee in a gas station bathroom,
which is one of the worst gas station bathrooms I have seen in my life, and I’m
a guy. To make matters worse, Chloe sits completely flush on the toilet
seat, she doesn’t even hover.
Blecch. I heard this book was going to be unsettling but I didn’t know it would
be targeting my stomach. While she’s making tinkles, a spooky voice from the
stall next to hers calls out for help and an eerie pink glow begins to emanate
from within. The voice says that its hands are not where they’re supposed to
be, which is the weirdest pick-up line I’ve heard in a long time. I almost
forgot to mention that back at Chloe’s house the weird Dominos delivery guy
that we can only see from behind is listening to her voicemails and skulking
around her house, when the three Haverlin brothers—the burly, red-haired trio
that saved Chloe from drowning herself in the first issue—are there in the
kitchen, one of them aiming a shotgun at the delivery guy. Who reacts by saying
“booop” in a weird, yellow font.
So Astrid Mueller is
really grilling Joe Wei about his beliefs concerning the ground consisting of
angels’ faces, and he tentatively tells her that Heaven is down and Hell is up.
Incensed for some reason, Astrid asks Joe how he knows this, and threatens to
expose the whereabouts of his wife, which freaks him out something fierce. So
the Clean Room turns into a river in Oregon where Joe liked to go fly fishing.
His wife, he explains, is back at the hotel reading because she doesn’t like
the swarming bugs. Joe likes the bugs, though, seems they had some kind of
partnership that turned sour, which frankly should have been no surprise. Bugs
are nothing if not ruthlessly efficient at business. Back at Chloe Pierce’s
apartment the weird Dominos delivery guy turns around to reveal he’s some kind
of weird goblin with razor-sharp teeth? He beats up the Haverlin brothers—and
may kill one or two of them, it’s unclear. He walks away saying “booop” which I
suppose is as sensible a thing someone could be expected to say in this
situation. Back at the gas station, the attendant pulls Chloe out of the
stinking bathroom before she can open the stall with the creepy light and voice
coming from it. He’s pissed off that her credit card was declined for belonging
to a dead person, and immediately suggest she jerk him off to settle the bill.
Can you do that? I mean, what’s the exchange rate? Before they can settle up,
Astrid Mueller’s right-hand enforcer Killian Reed shows up and damn near twists
this guy’s arm clean off his body. I mean, it is pretty gross and graphic and
awesome, so you should definitely check it out. I thought about posting it
here, but it’s really too good to just dump into the world, go give it a look,
at least flip through it at your local comic shop. Funniest part is, before
taking off, Killian threatens the attendant to wait five minutes before getting
help as he writhes in pain on the ground. Lady, if this guy can form a coherent
sentence in five minutes, then he’s got to be on PCP.
We wrap it up with Joe
Mei, who is now reminiscing about the time he and his wife were abducted by
aliens or bugs or alien bugs, and they sliced her abdomen open with a lazer and
yanked some sort of purple organ out of her. Just then, whatever it was Astrid
hoped to accomplish by torturing this poor asshole begins to manifest, and she
says she wants to see its master while Joe Mei agonizes on a medical table. Cut
to a diner where Killian is awkwardly trying to seduce Chloe when a report
comes on the radio that Astrid Mueller adherent and totally not Tom Cruise
analog Rand Tanner has committed suicide, so Killian takes off to presumably do
some damage control. She calls the home office and insists they pull her out of
her Clean Room session—a big no-no, as you might imagine—and upon doing so we
find that Joe Mei has been possessed by the spirit of the guy who tried to run
her over as a child, and besides that he’s also pulled his eyes out of his head
as a neat party trick!
This is a weird freaking
book, people, if you haven’t noticed. There’s something about it that seems
overly complex, even though there were but three stories happening
simultaneously. But each vignette had so much oddball shit in it that they felt
like fully-realized stories of their own. Reading this book can be a little
exhausting, but it’s a kind of exhausted where you’ve got genuine goosebumps
and an uneasy feeling that maybe the visible world isn’t the one we need to be
fearful of. I’ve grown to really like the artwork and Jon Davis-Hunt’s unique,
fleshy style, and there are some great scenes. Like the one where that one guy
gets his arm twisted two ways. Yikes.
Seriously, go check that one out unless you’re some dumb little scaredy-pants
kid or something.
Bits and Pieces:
Things get no more normal
and a lot more spooky in the third issue of Clean
Room. The story felt, at times, a bit burdensome, but the cuts happened at
the right times to keep me wanting to find out more. Jon Davis-Hunt seems to be
in a good groove here, and renders some noteworthy panels that you’re gonna
have to look at the comic book to see. Having enjoyed the series thus far, this
installment served only to whet my appetite for more, but if you were to hop on
to the series with this particular issue I’d expect you’d be fairly well lost.
And grossed out. But in a good way.
7.5/10
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