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Kids! Comics!
100 BULLETS #48
Story: Brian Azzarello
Art: Eduardo Risso
This is
Part Two of "In Stinked," a story arc about a trailer-park
zoo and a motley assortment of testosterone-poisoned meatheads,
and it's just getting weirder.
Big Jack
flashes back to how he got the titular bullets in between
falling in love with one of the tigers -- testing the feel
of its claws on his forearm, skulking around in the dark pretending
to be a big cat, and eventually defending it against the three
street gangsters who show up for a "hunting" party.
See, the
gangsters want tigerskin rugs, but they want to say they killed
the animals themselves. And why fly to Siberia or India when
you can just drive out to the backwoods and pay to have three
caged tigers tranquilized so you can shoot them through the
bars while they're not moving around and stuff? I know, it
sounds easy, but Jack has his own ideas about how the armchair
safari ought to operate.
Everyone
in this issue is milling around, pacing, following random
threads of conversation and momentary impulses. Everyone's
an animal, everyone's a little bit pitiful and a little bit
deadly, but only a few are focused in the way of a true predator.
And when the cages open, all bets are off as to who's the
prey.
The best
part: I don't have a single guess what might happen in Part
Three. I can't wait.
Rating:
NEOTOPIA 2.5
Story and Art: Rod Espinosa
If you
were thinking that maybe this comic sounded a little sedate
for your tastes, I have two words for you: underwater dogfight.
Yeah,
seriously. These ships may look like 19th century sailing
vessels, but they're not only zeppelins, they're submarines
too. Most of this issue is devoted to the tactics involved
in first getting the ship out of range of Eriden's tech-seeking
missiles, and then escaping the clutches of the creepy Taskmaster
Ghul, who shows up in a much bigger ship with an ultimatum
for the Princess. Once again, it's all about teamwork, with
a side order of bait and switch.
In between
all this, we have an informative reminiscence about how the
servant girl Nalyn ended up taking the place of the original
Princess, exposition that might have been covered in the first
volume of Neotopia but which is mighty helpful to those of
us who came in late. And Espinosa treats us to some more exquisite
shadowy pages with a couple of silent underwater moments showing
us the solution to moving a ship without using detectable
power. It's terrifically cinematic stuff, easily imaginable
as anime or even live-action. If the new Namor series
had featured sequences like this, where there's actually a
reason the story takes place under the ocean, I'd probably
still be reading it.
I don't
know how the business of comics publishing works, particularly
when it comes to more independent publishers, so I don't know
what to make of the fact that this issue showed up for me
a week after the last one and is dated November 2003. I do
know that if it maintains the
current quality I'm only too happy to match its pace.
Rating:
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