Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Comic Books >

A review of the new Epic title Gun Theory

10:49 / 18.09.03

The big hurricane is supposed to hit my town in about seven hours, so last night I stopped by the comic shop and picked up a bunch of reading material in case the power goes out. One of these titles was Gun Theory. It was the worst comic of the bunch.

The art was fine. The story was awful. It's written by Daniel Way, I'm really not sure if he's an insider or a newbie who hit the Epic lottery. The entire story is told in first person narrative captions. And every caption is the main character telling us how professional he is when it comes to killing people. Five pages of the hitman killing two guys while talking about what he's going to have for breakfast. Every other caption is "I'm a professional killer. I stay calm. Because I'm a professional killer.".

There are five splash pages in the book. Of nothing, no action, just random splash pages. The pages that have panels are usually two or three panels. Huge pictures and not much action. It's really just a bad comic.

11:08 / 18.09.03

you see, that just pisses me off.

Mister Six, whom all the girls

12:43 / 18.09.03

Yeah, I flipped through it in the store. It was indeed as described above. I would have rather had "I'm a professional writer, stay calm, inspiration will come, till then, I'm a professional writer, Marvel bought my script, must keep writing... breakfast burrito, I love those, keep writing..." Oh, and the 'she's a beautiful lady bit.'

Thanks, Daniel, for writing what we can clearly see. We readers might be raving idiots and not be able to see that he is killing people and looking at ladies. Narration adds so much insight, doesn't it?

12:56 / 18.09.03

Christ, it sounds like a parody of mid-90s Vertigo.

Regrettable Juvenilia

13:14 / 18.09.03

What I've seen of this makes it look like the only interesting thing Epic has to offer so far - but that's an impression based mostly on the art, which has a pleasingly Pope-ish aspect. I'll reserve my opinion of the end result til I've had a chance to read it, but I would note that this was first written & drawn as an original graphic novel, which Marvel/Epic then picked up on and offered to publish.

16:24 / 18.09.03

Daniel Way is a "newbie." I have a Gun Theory preview ashcan that I picked up at the Chicago con two years ago, when the two guys were obviously shopping it around for a publisher.

I liked the look of it back then, but looking through the new full-length Epic version, it doesn't do much for me any more.

08:30 / 19.09.03

Hmmm, going to have to look into this, but I'm pretty sure he's not out and out new to writing. As far as I am aware, there are only two non-pros working for Epic at the moment, and Way ain't one of them.

I'll get back.

01:14 / 22.09.03

My critique was really lacking in the art department, to tell you the truth I usually don't really notice comic art unless it's horrible. But the artisit on the book, Jon Proctor, is pretty good. If he was following the script and had to do 5 splash pages I guess it's not his fault. But his panels were easy to follow, and his characters have these crazy litle lines all over them that I kinda like. So the art is actually pretty good. Even the colorist, Lee Loughridge, did a good job. The colors have this orange fall season thing going on.

SavageFistsOfFengshui

11:50 / 22.09.03

Way has various stuff published by Marvel in the last year or so, including three issues of Wolverine and two issues of Spider-Man: Tangled Web. He's currently writing Venom.

15:03 / 22.09.03

Ooop! I stand corrected.

Mister Six, whom all the girls

19:35 / 22.09.03

... and the new Ant-Man.

05:29 / 23.09.03

What gets me is that the Epic submission guidelines and every post and interview by everyone connected with Epic, when asked about what not to do and cliches they're sick of seeing, uniformly said: captions.

Now this book comes out and from the flick through I gave it in the shop and this thread, it's 90% captions. Fucking nice one.

Imaginary Mongoose Solutions

22:39 / 24.09.03

"Gun Theory" has been sitting around in OGN format for a few years. Marvel had Way re-tool it to Mini-Series format.