| Six
I love
Image for the chances it takes with its publishing. Without
their willingness to give both tested and untested creators
a chance to do comics with less editorial controls than the
Big Two, we wouldn’t have books like The
Walking Dead or Rex
Mundi. But with their willingness to publish the
obscure and overlooked, sometimes the ambiguous and underdeveloped
will sneak in through the side door. I am of course speaking
about the subject of this review, Six by Michael
Avon Oeming, Daniel Berman, and Ethan Beavers.
I am
not positive I could actually tell you what Six
is about, and apparently there are those at Image that agree
with me since the back of the comic carries no description
of what lies beneath the cover. The only thing on the back
cover is a glowing snippet of review from someone at Wizard
magazine. Since Wizard reviews are almost always glowing,
no matter what subject matter, I trust this about as far
as I could throw a public bus.
As it
is my duty, here’s my shot at explicating; Agent Six
is a hunter of rogue agents, but he’s not your everyday
spyhunter. Six is from something called Galaxy One and he
hunts down rogue agents that have escaped from their usual
job of observing Earth the way psychologists fuss over rats.
It seems that time on Earth makes the agents go crazy, and
when they do Six hunts them down and transmits their consciousness
back to Command for cleansing. That is, until Six starts
to feel the effects of Earth as well.
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Half of what
I have written up there is guessing on my part. The script
for this story is so ambiguous and devoid of content that
I’ve actually explained most of the plot within the
above paragraph. At fifty-six pages, Oeming and co-writer
Berman had very little time to tell a story and failed utterly
at it and despite the last page featuring the tagline “End
Act 1” I somehow doubt we’ll see a lot more
of this Agent Six. There’s no character in the script;
Six not only has nothing that separates him from anyone
else in the book, he doesn’t even have a name. The
only other characters that appear are also nameless, using
a number designation. I cannot think of an easier way to
alienate the reader.
Their script
is also spotty and jumpy in terms of actual plot. We’re
given almost nothing about what exactly Galaxy One is. Is
it another galaxy in our universe? Is it another plane of
existence? Even when Six communicates with the equally mysterious
Command, the authors aren’t sure exactly how to present
it; in one scene Six receives commands that show up as white
block lettering, and in later scenes it appears that Command
speaks through along, nonsensical stream of consonants and
vowels. There’s no information about anything in this
entire comic, which is just wrong. Even when writing to
entice the reader into reading the next volume, even when
being stingy as far as giving away one’s plot, you
have to give some information to the reader to make them
care about reading the story.
The
artwork by Ethan Beavers is serviceable, and the additional
inks by Oeming himself helps, but I have some serious issues
with Beavers' style. I’m not actually sure it is Beavers’
style. Half of the panels in this book look as if Oeming
took over art duties where Beavers might not be up to the
task. Either Beavers is a devout fan of Oeming’s work
and likes to honor the artist by aping his style, or Oeming
is the guy who taught him to draw. I will say that Beavers
seems more than capable of staging dynamic panels that move
and describe action well, but again I see echoes of Oeming.
Beavers' also has a good grasp of negative space and uses
to surprisingly interesting effect in some places.
I’m
not sure what Oeming and Berman were going for with this
comic; my best guess is that they were thinking of creating
something along the lines of Shade the Changing Man,
maybe trying to give it a flavor of Steve Ditko, but here
non-plot is not crazy enough, and the black and white art
is nothing close to the frightening genius of Ditko. Even
for $5.95, I wouldn’t pick this up because it’s
six bucks wasted on a slim piece of almost-nothing that
probably only got green-lit because Oeming’s name
was attached.
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