Enter Comics with Locke and Key
Save for the occasional anthology issue, it’s been give or take a couple of years since Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’s beautiful series Locke and Key ended. Honestly, I still have mixed feelings about the series concluding up to this day. On one hand, it’s like being punched right in the dick whenever I think about not having to read more stories about Keyhouse, the Locke family, and the whole Locke and Key world and that all we’re left with yet again is the endless downpour of crap coming from other publishers. On the other, though, I’m glad it concluded the way it did and at the exact time it did; overstay its welcome, it did not. Had things been different, there’s always the chance that Locke and Key may have devolved into a shitty circus of overplayed tropes and antics beaten worse than a dead horse, so it’s great that the whole mythology of the series is still preserved. Then again, time will only tell if that will be the case. After all, Hill and Rodriguez got to make ends meet, after all, man. And don’t tell me that a shitty sequel won’t affect the original, because it does. I mean, come on, you can’t say that a whole story is good if you’ve only read or watched about a third of it or less. In that regard, having a phenomenal 1/3 of a story is far less appealing, and also makes the whole of less and less quality, than having a whole one that’s great. Doing reboots, on the other hand, that’s a whole different story for another time.
So, aside from the amazing way that Locke and Key is a title that actually has an end – meaning it really has a story worth following, as opposed to a shitty perpetual existence in publication that’s divided into arcs or re-numberings or some such bullshit –, it truly is a tale that will have you hooked from beginning to end. That’s mainly because it hits all the right spots.
For one, there’s the whole pitch of Locke and Key: it’s about a family who owns a magical house that contains keys that possess fantastic abilities, which it can grant any person who uses them (meaning, simply inserting it into a lock, turning it, then opening a door. There’s no need for crap about the power of the sun or bats here).
Then, of course, there’s the way the whole story plays out. Now, it is pretty acceptable for you to think that Locke and Key’s whole plot revolves around the power that those magical keys grant their users and how said users employ these abilities, but you’d be wrong. Go read your precious little X-Men comics for that. From start to finish, Locke and Key plays like a family drama mixed with elements of fantasy and, if we’re to believe all those other nerd sites that won’t shut their yap about comics, horror. I actually disagree with the third point there. Maybe I’ll tell you about it next time.