The Displaced #5 Review

This final issue of one of 2024's best miniseries so far brings this thrilling story to an exciting conclusion.

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE DISPLACED #5

Often times in books where something tragic happens, readers often look for a happy ending in order to feel better about what happened to the main character or characters at the beginning. However, rather than being a story about justice or revenge or being made whole, this is a story about coping with loss. This part of the story, rather than happily reuniting our characters with their loved ones, we see them come to peace with their fate. I liked that Ed Brisson didn't over-explain what was going on and left questions unanswered - such as what happened to Oshawa? What happened to the people that disappeared? What happened to the survivors that then subsequently vanished? These are all things that I perhaps felt were important at the time when reading but upon reading the last issue, realized that this story wasn't about that. This wasn't about finding out what happened, it was about telling the story of these characters and the many different ways losing someone can hurt you. Paige lost her mother and didn't to make amends before she lost her. Gabby was so lost without her family that she walked off on the off chance that she could be with them. Tav lost himself. He went completely rogue and horrid when this happened, losing his own humanity in the process. The main common factor between all these characters is that they had someone they lost - except for Harold and Emmett. But then Harold and Emmett were the keys that kept this turning. Harold escaped by killing himself, but it makes me wonder - how many times did Harold guide survivors through this? And how many times will Emmett do it? Ed Brisson wrote a classic here, and I implore anyone that missed the single issues to pick up a collected edition when that comes out.

Luca Casalanguida continued his great art through the end of the series. He depicts some emotionally driving scenes in this final issue that really drive home the unfortunate ending for these characters. Paige's demise on the beach was illustrated beautifully and made me care about a character that I didn't relate to much. Dee Cunniffe once again uses a darker color pallette and it works perfectly. I noticed that Cunniffe used colors that reminded me a bit of dawn, which played nicely into the repetition of missing cities revealed in the end. Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou is still one of the best letterers in comics. Insanely creative with the shape of his speech bubbles, the font used for more heated confrontations, as well as his always fantastic sound effects. He and Rus Wooten are perhaps the two letterers that I'm able to identify their specific lettering without knowing it's them beforehand.

In the end, this story was everything I hoped from the solicit and at the same time, not at all what I expected. Ed Brisson and crew took what could have been a random Twilight Zone episode and turned it into something spectacular. The Displaced #5 is in shops this Wednesday June 19th.