Comics Reviews (October 5th, 2016)
Jessica Jones #1
An adequate first issue, although annoyingly hard to square away with Jessica Jones’s recent appearance in Spider-Man just a couple of weeks ago, which makes sense, as it’s obviously difficult for two writers to square up their plots in two different books, especially when there’s a major crossover going on that’s throwing all sorts of books out of sync. Oh wait, both books and the crossover are by the same writer who’s consistently a fucking trainwreck when it comes to this sort of thing. Anyway, it’s very “yes this is an issue of Alias Jessica Jones” that dumps a bunch of premise in a pile on the floor and promises to come back later and do something with it. Coin flip whether I bother to do so.
Shade the Changing Girl #1
Good premise and good art, but nothing that’s quite sparking for me. The alien weirdness, not unlike Doom Patrol, feels a bit forced – like an homage to a particular style of comics zaniness rather than something that’s actually extending out of the creative team’s interests. I suspect this is going to be the crux of my problem with the Young Animals stuff – the sense that it’s mostly the borrowed fire of twenty year old comics done with a contemporary gloss.
James Bond: Eidolon #10
An absolutely rock solid comic. Ellis moves his pieces around the board deliberately, with each of the scenes building tension and complexifying the situation until the final one, which gloriously upends everything and kicks the plot into high gear. Can’t wait for the denouement to all of this.
Shipwreck #1
Surreal, unsettling, and not entirely clear about what it’s doing yet. At the moment this seems to be Ellis in the same vein as Supreme: Blue Rose, but with Phil Hester in place of Tula Lotay. This means less avant garde art, but isn’t really a problem – Hester’s a rock solid and clear storyteller, and his jagged figures are haunted things that look like they staggered out of a fever dream. This is playing its cards close to the chest, and it’ll be a good few issues before it’s possible to declare for sure that it’s brilliant (remember how long Injection took to get to a boil?), but by all appearances it’s another triumph for late phase Ellis. …