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A travesty? Hardly. Casey's biggest problem with Wildcats is his pacing. I am increasingly convinced that his run on volume 2 worked as a slow burn largely because of the quality of Sean Phillips' art: you don't mind not much happening if it's good to look at, plus the fact that Phillips excels at noir, which meant that there was always a sense of suspense - that the other shoe *was* going to drop, that tensions would explode, etc...
Sadly in Wildcats 3.0 the pace of events has slowed to even more of a crawl, and the art isn't of the same standard. It's all become a bit too formulaic, too: Casey focuses on some lurid subject matter (this is a title that hasn't benefited from the 'Mature Readers' tag), and then has his godlike android ex machina appear to fix things in a morally ambivalent way while making a very, very long speech about using corporations to improve the world. So, to use the most troubling example, Wax is into non-consensual hypnosis sex and has killed his boss and stolen his identity. Jack Marlowe finds out and lets him get away with it because it furthers Halo's interests. See also: the Halo employee whose name escapes me who kills someone in a road rage incident. Now, Casey may be intending there to be a pay-off (if he doesn't intend Wax to get some kind of comeuppance, or at least for one sympathetic character to twig that something is very wrong there, then that's a whole other can of worms entirely...). But in the meantime, if there's nothing else going on to hold your interest, people get bored of waiting.
And then they drop the title, like I did somewhere around issue 10. I don't miss it, in fact I can't help wondering why I kept buying it as long as I did... |
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