| January
2008 |
Gary Brunswick, Frank Espinosa, Toby Cypress, Killing Girl (Image, 2007), 5-issue miniseries; $2.99; John Sheridan, Kit Wallis, Breathe (Marikosia, 2007), 4-issue miniseries; $2.99.
The plotting of
Killing
Girl is pretty straightforward
neo-noir stuff, and, at first, it seems to do it fairly
well. And there are enough twists to keep it interesting,
at least for a while. But like so many comics these days,
the promises of the premise are not fulfilled by what
follows. The first issue delivers more believable
complications than most other titles manage in five, and
then all of a sudden the book runs out of steam and
imagination. The problems come into focus quickly with
issue #2, where the writing starts pulling apart at the
seams: long-lost sister found, gun accidentally goes off,
long-lost sister dead (resulting in the following
emotionally dead and logically incoherent piece of dialogue
from dead sister’s fiancé: “She shot her! Keep the fuck
away!”). And then everything goes to hell, as the whole
thing increasingly feels like it was scripted by a 12-year
old with a good story idea and a really, really short
attention span and a bad case of writer’s cramp. Frank
Espinosa (Rocketo)
does his best to bring his unique visual energy and
painterly sensibility to the art, desperately trying to
cover as best he can some pretty egregious gaps and
fissures in the writing. But ultimately it is too much of a
mess for even someone of his prodigious talents.
Still, at least for the
two issues Espinosa is at the drawing board, it is worth
every agonizing clinker from Brunswick’s word processor
(here’s another good one: “I read something about happiness
not being about what material shit you have, but whether or
not you’re in the flow.”). I love Espinosa’s work on
Rocketo,
with its lively Caribbean palette, dynamic lines and unique
composition. With Killing
Girl, Espinosa seems to be
experimenting with an even more expressionistic and
minimalist style, and it works just right for the story,
such as it is. It would have worked even better had there
been more of a story to express. Still, I can’t help but
admire the hell out of Espinosa’s bravado here. We are used
to our mafia/assassin-girl stories in black-leather and
neon—the rehashed Aeon
Flux/Femme
Nikita teenaged fantasies (the
same hash Brunswick is feverishly refrying here). So for
Espinosa to bring to the subject his unique energy and
visual humor was surprising and made all other sins almost
forgivable. But Espinosa left after issue 2, and there are
myriad sins in his wake to account for.
When Toby Cypress takes over in issue 3 he tries to
continue Espinosa’s approach, but it doesn’t work in his
hands. At all. It feels derivative, immature and
unfinished. And there is sooooo much more work to do.
Brunswick writes like someone who gives and takes script
pitches for a living in Hollywood. The first issue was a
good pitch, but like a lot of Hollywood types, there is no
follow-through. By issue #4 we have the sweet granny with
the sub-machine gun, the gangster getting the bad news and
calling on his best assassins to finish the job, the Big
Boss and the hints of a larger “conspiracy”—all of it
patched together with the finesse and subtlety of your
average piece of fan fiction. I can’t blame Espinosa for
bailing on the book (in fact, I can’t help but admire him),
but in doing so he took away the only reason to hang around
for the final issue, where our heroine/killer will kill the
bad guys (for whom she worked twenty seconds ago), save her
dead sister’s fiancé, and then either die or ride off into
the sunset. (Since beginning this review, issue #5 has come
out, and it all comes to pass precisely as I had imagined,
only, which I could not have imagined, even lamer). Like so
many of these self-contained mini-series popping up all
over our comicbook store shelves, we cannot help but ask,
“Why?”
Things only get more dire
with Breathe.
Every now and then something so awful, so unforgivable is
put on the comics shelves that it cannot be ignored. Like
the foulest of sins, its name must be spoken aloud and then
banished from the face of the earth. In the case of
Breathe,
this is especially urgent, as its writer and creator, John
Sheridan, has obviously been told by one of satan’s minions
that he has talents and should plan on writing other new
projects. And were this to happen I fear very sincerely
that all goodness and beauty might be blotted from the
universe.
Normally I avoid such hyperbole (well, sometimes I do,
anyway), but this is the language of Breathe,
a world where revenge is a dish best served on the tongue
of a dragon’s spawn—or something like that. There is
nothing in this story to recommend it to anyone: it is
Orientalist fantasy set in 18th-century “China” (you
can tell
it’s China
because the comic tells you so), in which a girl’s family
is killed and she spends four torturous issues discovering
that the killer is in fact precisely who it obviously was
from the very first issue. And then she dies. Along the way
we meet a range of underdeveloped characters and cardboard
stereotypes, and many tears are shed. And some other people
die, too.
The art offers only a tad more to recommend it. Kit
Wallis’s delicate line work is well suited to the gossamer
plotting, and he does the Americanime with a certain degree
of individual style. And the coloring works off a subdued,
(highly computerized) watercolor palette that keeps the
book for the most part visually interesting (despite some
very heavy-handed arthouse framing). But really, this book
along with Killing
Girl (which is only marginally
better), points to something rotten in the heart of comics
these days, something I hope we can work together to purge
from the system. After Breathe
and
Killing
Girl, it is time to finally
declare what we have needed for some time: a moratorium on
all mini-series. They are increasingly lazy, rapacious in
their Hollywood fantasies, and decidedly untrue to the
comics form. If you don’t have enough story to imagine
doing it for 100 issues, write up a 100 page script and
shop it around Hollywood. But in the name of all that is
holy, leave the comics out of it.