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Bump. Just because the new issue - number 11 - is completely and utterly wonderful, but I’m currently feeling like I’m the only boy in the world still reading this title. The last issue was great, having the best twist ending so far in the series; but this month, Javier Pulido returns! And really, whoever had the bright idea of having Pulido and Chiang each doing stints, five issues on, five issues off, deserves a big shiny medal. They’re both great artists in entirely different ways, and whether it’s the extra time the break affords them, or else the spur of the competition, Pulido’s somehow managed to come back this month looking better than ever. Really. Go and have a peek, next time you’re in a comic shop: ‘tis lovely. Doing his own colours for the first time I think, which maybe explains some of the changes in his style. No longer seems to feel any pressing need to enclose every area of space with a box or a black line. Or something. At any rate, all the layouts seem really loose and open. There’s so little actually there on the page and yet you can feel the dryness of the air. I reckon this guy could draw a pollen count if he set his mind to it. With just a few brush strokes and a perfectly judged choice of colours. I’m properly bowled over. And yeah, even if they weren’t so perfectly suited to the storytelling, on a purely aesthetic level, I’d *still* really dig the colour schemes in this issue: big slabs of pink and grey, blue and yellow, red and green. Oh, we’re spoiled for fab artwork in comics at the moment. What with Seaguy also being such a joy and all. Kids today, they don’t know they’re born.
And man, Milligan’s really hitting a stride with the character. It totally works as a monthly soap opera. A monthly soap opera with guns and interchangable faces and a nice line in callous bastard humour, that is. The actual jobs themselves, the identities Chance takes on, are almost irrelevant: you get told the full story of the interesting ones, but far more important at the moment is the sense of how many contracts Chance fulfils every single week, the sheer amount of identities he constantly cycles through, that skating-on-thin-ice rush that he runs on, contrasted with the little effects it’s sloooowly having. Not on his state of mind, nothing so obvious, but rather on the way he sees and relates to other people, which is brilliant. And with a typically dry Milligan-interior monologue providing a running commentary. Best Milligan commentary track since Enigma, no kidding.
Oh, sorry for the gush, but I so love comics right now. |
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