Soul is that series that unfortunately needs to exist as it deals with the racism of the era. It’s not so arrogant or deep that it tackles the entire subject on its own, but it does at least approach the subject. The reason it needs to exist is because the rest of the series is race natural. We’ve see a lot of different nationalities working together with no mention of race. Soul is a bit different though as it continues to follow Ben from the original story of Night of the Living Dead. Ben is being forced to explain himself and the events of the night before to the Sheriff. Even though the Sheriff has seen firsthand how crazy everything has been he still takes the time to deal with Ben and eventually arrests him to confirm his story. Crazy right? I mean, it’s been coming to that since the first issue, but it finally happened. After Ben is arrested though he’s put on a helicopter with a sick man… you can probably guess what’s coming next. This issue ends with a hell of a cliffhanger.
The writing and story improved a lot from the last issue. Ben’s character is still being fleshed out a bit and we’re still seeing the many different sides of the Sheriff. What the story does right in this issue is avoid filler. Everything feels necessary to the story and issue whereas the previous issue suffered from a lack of content.
Overall the art has improved as well. There’s some set pieces that are still very generic looking and I could tell without looking at the credits that there were two different artists on the book. Overall it’s a lot more consistent, but it’s strange that this series seems to always have the biggest dip in quality when it comes to the art. The scenes with the first person POV were some of the best of the series and really put you into the story that Ben was recapping.
This is a much better issue than the last, but it still has some room for improvement. Maybe now that the story is finally moving away from the farmhouse it will have a chance to expand and really let Ben grow as a character like Barbara and Johnny have. For now, this issue works, but if it doesn’t keep up the effort I could see this one being easy to skip.
Score: 3/5
Soul #3 – “Free Fall” Story: Michael Coast, Julian Rowe Script: Michael Coast Layouts: Julian Rowe Pencils: Ricardo Sanchez, Kurt Tiede Publisher: Double Take Comics Price: $2.50 Release Date: 2/24/16 Format: Ongoing; Print/Digital