It’s a tad… Victorian, isn’t it?
I mean, it’s an excellent issue and a decent close to Dear Billy, but it’s just too confined.
With the whole letter to Billy thing–Ennis either has to use it as a letter to the guy or a narrative device. So he uses it as a narrative device. A delivery system for the story, which it’s not properly equipped to do. It’s a letter, it’s meant to be read.
The letter doesn’t open this issue and maybe it needed to be present again, from the start. Ennis’s spends the first two issues expanding the world of the protagonist–but not in the third issue. He constricts. Worse, he shifts a lot of the storytelling attention to Billy, away of Carrie.
It’s a very serious story and Ennis takes it seriously. But in being respectful, I think it got a little loose from him.
