By Jonathan Edwards

I swear, with every new issue of Royal City, I read it, love it, and want more. Lemire does such a good job of setting and maintaining a tone that it hardly takes any effort to slip back into the same emotional space each month. Furthermore, he has a specific way of revealing information so that it informs about the characters and world while also generating further intrigue and follow-up questions. As far as I can tell, the "model" (if you want to call it that) tends to be something of a reversed order of events. We meet a character who's feeling a certain way or in a certain state of mind. Then, we slowly move backwards to find out the actual event that got them there. And after that, we uncover what led to that event. For example, Tara and her husband Steve have been at odds since the first issue, and with this one we finally learn what the cause of that was (I refuse to spoil it). And now, the question becomes "what else was going on before it that affected and led up to it?" It's really great stuff, and I can only presume it will all eventually lead back to finding out exactly what happened to Tommy Pike.