Ain't No Grave #4
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeAin't No Grave #4 (August 7, 2024) stands as a formally daring chapter in a five-issue miniseries precisely because it strips away virtually every word from its pages, delivering a near-total silent issue — save for two words on the final page — to carry Ryder through a harrowing internal reckoning on the threshold of Death itself. The creative choice is thematically deliberate: the chapter is titled 'Depression,' anchoring it within a grief-stages structure that runs through the entire miniseries, and the absence of dialogue and caption boxes forces readers to engage with Jorge Corona's visual storytelling on its own terms, a genuine act of trust between creators and audience. Critics across multiple outlets received it as a showcase of what the medium can accomplish through pure image-making, noting that colorist Jean-François Beaulieu's palette work bore as much narrative weight as any scripted line of dialogue. As the penultimate issue in one of Image Comics' most widely reviewed creator-owned releases of 2024, it represents a high-water mark for the Young–Corona collaboration and for the craft of silent sequential storytelling in contemporary mainstream indie comics.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
Ain't No Grave was announced on February 6, 2024, as the third collaboration between Eisner Award-winning writer Skottie Young and Eisner Award-nominated Venezuelan artist Jorge Corona — the team previously behind the Eisner-nominated Middlewest and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated The Me You Love in the Dark — all published through Image Comics. The full creative team carried over from those prior works: colorist Jean-François Beaulieu and letterer Nate Piekos, both long-standing collaborators with Young, join Corona on interiors, while Marla Eizik edited the series. Young stated publicly that the project drew on a darker register of his imagination than his earlier material, rooting Ryder's story in themes of love, loss, and the lengths a person will go to protect a life they only recently found worth living.
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- Released August 7, 2024, as issue four of a five-issue limited series published by Image Comics (rated Mature).
- Written by Skottie Young; interior art by Jorge Corona; colors by Jean-François Beaulieu; letters by Nate Piekos; cover A by Jorge Corona.
- The issue is structured as an almost entirely wordless (silent) chapter — only two words appear, on the final page — making it one of the most formally ambitious issues in the series.
- The chapter is internally titled 'Depression,' placing it within the series' overarching grief-stages framework (each issue corresponds to a stage of grief, with the finale representing 'Acceptance').
- Narratively, Ryder washes ashore near an abandoned mine after being ejected from Madam Gates's supernatural riverboat casino at the end of issue #3, and she traverses a ghost-town version of Cypress while confronting visions of her past, present, and future before reaching the doorstep of Death itself.
- A 1:25 retailer incentive variant cover for this issue was drawn by Skottie Young himself — the series writer — an unusual instance of the author providing incentive cover art for his own title.
- The five-issue run was collected as Ain't No Grave TP, Vol. 1, released December 4, 2024, from Image Comics; a French-language edition was subsequently licensed to Urban Comics (announced for February 2025), continuing that publisher's track record of releasing all prior Young–Corona Image collaborations.
- Issue #4 earned an aggregated critic score of 8.6 out of 10 across nine professional reviews on ComicBookRoundUp, the series' highest individual-issue aggregate, reflecting the outsized critical attention the silent-issue format drew.
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