He may be dealing with an angsty break-ups with both his girlfriend and his friend-same incident-and struggling to accept his sister's relationship with another friend Zack, but he also starts showing a lot of maturity in his school work and personal life. Bode, always the heart and innocent center of Locke & Key and the Locke family, simultaneously its strongest and most vulnerable member, is seriously threatened, forced through the ghost door and re-inhabited by Zack himself.īut just as these events are growing more and more perilous for the Locke children, Tyler Locke is growing into a man capable of battling it. By the end of "Detectives," Zack has accomplished the unthinkable. His wolf attack in "Sparrow"-complete with the parasitic apparatus, first seen in his ghostly talk with Sam, on his back-is brutal and bloody and clearly fun for him. Zack's assault on the Locke family reaches a fevered pitch even in early issues. Keys to the Kingdom also raises the stakes considerably. The titular casualty, however seemingly irrelevant, is actually quite touching, a loss felt as genuinely by the reader as by Rufus. His easy interaction with Bode, two boys with difficulty making friends, albeit for very different reasons, is a welcome, if brief, respite from the constant danger posed by Zack and his search for the Omega Key. Locke & Key's Cassandra, able to see the truth-Keyhouse's ghosts and supernatural features as well as Zack's true character, and immune to the Head Key (and perhaps others)-but unable to communicate what he knows to others, Rufus is a delightful voice in the series. The second of these issues is "Casualties," an issue analogized to classic comic book forms, an imagining of Rufus's world from his perspective. The episode's sad and quietly heroic ending proves just how much Hill can do within the considerable restraints he gives himself.
Rodriguez does a striking job imitating Watterson's illustration style for Bode's world, in contrast with the style he's already developed for the series in panels told from the perspective of the other characters. It is, in other words, an exercise in writing a comic book in the style of newspaper comics, and it doesn't miss a beat. "Sparrow," the first in the mini-series and a tribute to Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson, is a structural delight: a collection of pages each with four syndication-style panels, which culminate in a mini-climax punch-line of their own. Joe Hill takes greater creative risks in his storytelling style in several of the issues in this collection, and he pulls off every one of them with spectacular aplomb. The already stellar Locke & Key takes a turn for the more adventuresome and ambition in Keys to the Kingdom.
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