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I wasn’t quite so sure about the bridge collapsing, whether the rats had deliberately loosened some bolts or whatever, but I’d agree with Kovacs that (as with the last year or so of NXM) the occasional lack of clarity does make it a bit harder to feel the flow of the story. That said, the art’s extremely good, isn’t it ? And for what might be termed a ‘decompressed’ comic, it’s not that quick a read, which is good to my mind; it’s not necessarily the readers waiting for the trade that’s a bad development in comics, but the writers wRiting for the trade.
But I digress: We3 has stuff you can pore over, and loads of little panels and all that kind of thing, putting me rather in mind of something like Hard Boiled.
One art detail which I rather like – and which I thought might be the case at the start of issue 1, but less so as that issue went on – is the way we don’t very often see a full-on face shot of a human outside of the lab. The opening of #1, if memory serves, had a bit of that, and I don’t think we see a proper face for the father or son at the end, or even really of the soldiers at the start of, #2. It reminds me of how Merkel was portrayed in Dark Knight and Batman Year One, or that Twilight Zone episode with the bloke who’s had plastic surgery and is in bandages for most of the episode. Anyway, has a neat effect of dehumanising the threats to the animals, and making the reader feel more of an affinity for them, I think, which is clever (though I realise, reading this thread, I’m nowhere near as close to the empathy other people are feeling, as I wasn’t even in the same postal code as crying. Must be desensitised or something).
I don’t think we’re necessarily seeing anything entirely groundbreaking in storytelling terms here – the slow-motion effect of multiple panels has been used a lot before now, and the ‘character moving outside the panels’ bit has been done in Animal Man and the Invisibles, for example – but it’s an interesting read, I think, and the concept behind it is straightforward and solid. I just hope that, unlike the aforementioned NXM, and Seaguy alike, the final part of it doesn’t suffer from too much of a sense of ‘missing story details’ or anything like that. Maybe I’m schizophrenic or something, but I think a three issue series should lend itself to the classic three-act story structure, and now we’ve had acts one and two, I hope we can see a satisfactory resolution to the tale; there are various narrative strands which need to be tied up to make it feel like a complete read, and I’d rather not have another instance of a Grant-scripted series ending with me reading the final issue and thinking ‘how’re they going to tie all this up in just a few pages ? … oh, they’re not. Or maybe my copy’s missing some pages. I’d better look on Barbelith to see what other people think happened’.
And yes, what a lovely cover – look at the texture on the bean bag and carpet. Very nicely done. Is it computer-work like Brian Bolland does for his covers, does anyone know ? Whatever, it’s really well done. |
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