Jane’s priceless footage of the Otherworld is missing; Barney is missing; Chet Charles is still missing; Gardt has been banished – what are Jane and Heather going to do?

BY NIGHT #6

Writer: John Allison
Artist: Christine Larsen
Colorist: Sarah Stern
Letterer: Jim Campbell
Publisher: BOOM! Studios
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: December 12, 2018

Previously in By Night: Jane and Heather are not speaking, after the incident where Heather dropped Jane into the vampire pit. In fact, everyone is rather cranky. Jane, however, finally has some amazing footage of the Otherworld. In the Otherworld, Gardt is brought before the Tribal Quorum, found guilty, and is sentenced to be exiled to the living mountain, Mount Eucchurus. Barney drops by Jane’s house to help her with editing, but when she nods off, he makes copies of the files, deletes them from her computer, and leaves.

MISSING FOOTAGE AND A NEW COMPLICATION

By Night #6 opens on the slopes of Mount Eucchurus where Gardt and his skull, Klay, prepare to die. But someone in red robes picks him up and carries him off.

Jane laments the lost footage. Heather, ever optimistic, wonders if Barney merely reorganized the files, renamed them, put them in another folder. Not Barney – Jane says he’s the kind of person who saves everything to the desktop. Has he been acting strange lately? No to that either – he’s just always been very bland. The girls decide to investigate more and head to his apartment. Jane suspects he’s just after money. Heather’s imagination starts running wild about other reasons he might want the footage. Then a big guy in a black car shows up and asks if they know Barney, and if so, to tell him that Donnie is looking for him. This guy is plainly someone’s muscle; Barney needs the money.

Speaking of Barney, he’s hanging out at a truck stop outside of Spectrum. He has a cap pulled low over his eyes, and has a list of major media sources he’s been contacting. Then Bo shows up, an old friend that Barney got in touch with. Barney asks him if he has $25K lying around, which is out of Bo’s league. Barney confesses he owes it to a Donnie Gabriel, which is plainly bad news. He shows Bo the footage and asks for his advice. Bo basically suggests trying to peddle it to various sorts of conspiracy theorists…but to leave out the footage of Gardt.

Gardt is still alive, and the man in the robes is none other than his friend Chet, who is older now. He’s been at Mount Eucchurus, and is still doing work. Gardt asks about his punishment – the Tribal Quorum banned him twenty-one years ago, on the word of Mount Eucchurus. But now he is living inside the mountain.

Barney goes back to Bo’s place and puts together a shortcut of the footage. He crashes while Bo shops around for a potential buyer. He also sends a “Sorry,” text to Jane. Meanwhile, the young people who were hanging around Charleswood a couple issues ago are talking about making a music video to try to go viral. Charlesco is, they determine, a metaphor for life in America. They start poking around the offices and find the projection room. They turn on the projector, and this time, something comes through from the other side.

Bo claims he has found a buyer for Barney and takes him there, but Donnie is there. Bo sold him out. Barney thought they were friends, but Bo tells him that he was the guy who sold him pills in high school – this should not be a surprise. Then the issue closes with Chip talking to his brother, the exterminator, and catching sight of something weird and big – the thing that came through the projector.

All of a sudden there’s a lot more plot here to this story. The stakes are high, and it isn’t just a tale of two young women and their hijinks. There is some clever dialogue throughout the issue. The humor isn’t slapstick, but it is definitely there.

TYING IT ALL TOGETHER

The art in By Night #6 is loose and expressive. In this issue, we have several new characters, and each is distinctive in their own way. I do like Chet Charles. He starts out as a mysterious, robed person, but when he takes the robe off, he’s dressed in a business shirt and slacks – although very much patched. He has made an office for himself in Mount Eucchurus – a desk, books, desk lamp, phone. And Klay reminds us that this is weird; in order to have this office, Chet hollowed out the inside of the head of their ruler. This is a seriously weird turn of events.

In keeping with the story so far, we’ve got other new and different scenes that are depicted sparingly, but clearly. I like both the truck stop (with its giant desserts) and Bo’s place, which is a terrible mess. We jump around among several locations, but they are all so well communicated that I had no trouble keeping track of where we were. There are some nice transitions between scenes as well.

BOTTOM LINE: NO LONGER JUST A ROMP

I actually really like that By Night #6 is getting a little grittier. I think that the story we frequently see is of adventures through a portal without a lot of consequences. This story is shaping up to be full of consequences, and now that we’ve come to know and like a lot of the characters, there is an emotional stake too.