The Luna Brothers, The Sword (Image, 2007- ). monthly, $2.99.
I
have enjoyed the Luna Brothers work since their first
mini-series for Image, Ultra, with precisely the same guilty pleasure
I reserve for others of this earth’s guilty pleasures. I
close the door, consume heartily, take a couple of advil,
and get on with my life. The fact that many have attempted
to turn them into auteurs in order to justify their own
enjoyment of this work has not surprised me. We have seen
it with so many others. In fact, it is one such critics’
darling, Quentin Tarrantino, who mosts comes to mind when I
read their work. Most Luna Brothers fans would assume this
to be the highest compliment, and I am happy to have them
think so. Like Tarantino, the Brothers have made something
of an art out of adolescent appetites for sexy ladies and
ultra-violence. Like the director, they have some keen
narrative and visual instincts and precious few ambitions
to translate those instincts to loftier material.
Fortunately for us, unlike Tarantino, the Luna Brothers
seem not to have let the auteurist hype go to their
heads too much, seemingly quite content to keep
doing what they do well. Unfortunately for us, most of us
will grow bored by what they do quite well long
before The
Sword has
completed its run. For me, that moment came about two
issues ago, and I for one feel little reason to hang around
to find out how our heroine will ultimately succeed in
killing Bill and co.
The
Sword tells the
story of a mysterious hammer that converts a crippled young
doctor into a mighty Thunder God. Just kidding! It
actually
tells the story of a
mysterious sword that transforms a crippled young woman
into a mighty sword-wielding super-killer. And lest you
think there is not much substance in this difference, let
me assure you that hammers don’t make nearly the same cool
“shnk” and “shlkt” sounds that swords do, and they don’t
dice bodies into bite-sized nuggets nearly as neatly. So we
are grateful for the progress the generations have wrought,
as The
Sword offers much
slicing and dicing to break up the otherwise stolid
wordiness of the long mythical flashbacks and seemingly
endless three-way phone conversations between the vengeful
fallen gods who have these past four thousand years been
seeking out their lost blade. Turns out, vengeful gods are
fairly dull when you get to listen in on their private
telecommunications. Sadly, it also turns out that watching
bodies come apart at the seems gets pretty tiresome, too,
especially when the bodies have all the humanity of
SecondLife avatars.
The Luna Brothers’ previous series for Image were both fine
examples of genre stories. Ultra (2004) told the by-now all-too familiar
tale of commercialized superheroes and the agents who love
them, focusing on one lonely heart in the group who is just
looking for a man she can trust—a kind of
Sex-in-the-Supercity. The book had little narrative payoff,
but it was witty (at times quite biting) and its
characterizations were sweet. They followed up their
freshman success with a longer series, Girls (2005-07), a small-town horror flic about
invading monster ladies (all of them conveniently nude and
identical), a book which ambitiously strove to translate an
adolescent male mysoginy into a twenty-something half-baked
feminism. The
Sword in many
ways promises to be their most ambitious narrative to date,
although I am not at all certain they are up for the task.
I find myself missing the unpretentious smallness of
Ultra
and wishing the Brothers
would recover some of the social satire that made that
book, despite having no clear tale to tell, the best of the
three.
But I am lying if I suggest that I haven’t enjoyed this
series for most of the first nine issues. And I may sneak a
peek at the issues to come, because frankly I kinda
actually do want to see how she dismembers the bad
gods, saves her friends (especially the guy from her
father’s writing classes who heard all the mythical stories
about the good old days, a conceit so lame it is totally
delicious). But I want to see it in the same way that I
want to eat a bag of chips—not because I am hoping for some
serious nourishment but because I am desperately craving
some fried saltiness with my evening mead. Nothing wrong
with it, as long as we don’t get all full of ourselves and
pretend it is something that it ain’t. Of course, the Luna
Brothers could think about heading off in different
directions with their significant talents and seeing what
they could do in the way of working with other artists and
writers. That would be a series I would want to follow
through to the end, guilt-free.
