Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye #1 and 2, by Jonathan Rivera and Gerard way (writers), Michael Avon Oeming (artist), Nick Filardi (color artist), Clem Robins (letterer) - That is still a mouthful of a title. Also, it's never a good thing when you reach the end of a tunnel and find a giant eye.Eileen, who was the princess of a subterranean kingdom and married to Cave Carson, has died. Cave is struggling to deal with what to do next, when he's visited by a member of that kingdom. Who is badly wounded, and then turns into a fungus monster. And it turns out Cave's boss may have something to do with this, and he's definitely trying to abduct Chloe, Cave and Eileen's college-age daughter. So Cave steals the Mighty Mole again (although there's a new version in development I'm sure will come into play), and with the help of Wild Dog of all people, attempts to save Chloe. Except the people chasing her also turn into fungus monsters.
I was glad to see Chloe and Cave have a reasonably good relationship. I was worried this was going to be one of those things were the father was a distant authoritarian and his kid hates him. Cave seems like he might have been a less-than-spectacular dad - that bit about awarding her meaningless ranks to produce greater effort was stupidly blunt - but he does seem to care about her, and she cares about him. Even if it seems like she's downplayed how much training she really got. Either that, or the training is working on a subconscious level she isn't aware of.
In addition to Wild Dog being a friend/mechanic/sounding board for Cave, Doc Magnus also showed up as the guy Cave goes to for getting that cybernetic eye. The Metal Men were there, not doing anything, just chilling. Magnus seems to be revamped to be sort of hipper, wearing the shirt of a sergeant in the Army unbuttoned and with goggles pushed back up on his forehead. Don't know if the Doc will pop up again or not.
There's these faint circles in the backgrounds for a lot of the panels. In the green circle around the panel where Cave details all the things his cybernetic eye told him about Chloe. Or on the next page, in the light shining through the diner windows to the street outside. And sometimes when a character is shown only in outline a shadow form, there are the little circles, but not always. I'm not at all sure what those are about, it seems like some distinct stylistic choice Filardi is making, but hell if I can parse what it means. There are a lot of colors in this - I think meant to represent the eye seeing things in spectrums outside visible light - that make me feel like I need 3-D glasses. There wasn't some sort of promotion involving those was there?
There are also some panels where character's eyes have peculiar shading in them, or they're empty dark voids. Probably significant, but also possibly an error, or just meant to be lighting. It's early days for the book, I can't rule anything out yet.
One of the things that convinced me to give the book a whirl was Oeming's art, though I wasn't paying enough attention to the credits when looking online to notice it was him. I just noticed the art reminded me a little of Darwyn Cooke's and I figured that worked pretty well for me. The two-page splash on pages 2 and 3 of the first issue is a nice peice of work, showing Cave's progression from Eileen's funeral to his empty home. The movement of the action -Cave walking left to right across the top as he exits the cemetery to his car, then driving back to the left across a background of a map towards a highway. Then a panel moving down the page at the far left of Cave on that busy highway, with a couple of panels of him calling into a talk radio show. Then him walking into his house, then down into his basement lab, which takes us to the bottom of the page as he gradually reaches his chair. And the fact the dialogue balloons get fewer and farther between as we move through the page, signifying the loneliness he's descending into it (add in how disconnected he is from any of the stuff being said to him, there's no reaction shown at all.) Also, Oeming uses a much thinner line when Cave starts seeing Eileen through the cybernetic eye from the rest of the art in the issue.
Anyway, there's mysteries afoot, and I do enjoy the potential of a good mystery, so I'm on board for a little while, at least.
No comments:
Post a Comment