What I Bought 4/12/2017

Only able to get one out of three books this week. Make do with what we've got.

Unbelievable Gwenpool #14, by Christopher Hastings (writer), Myisha Haynes (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Clayton Cowles (letterer) - Can't decide if Gwen actually paid for that stuff or not. Although I'm also not sure who Kate is aiming at. The angle of the arrow doesn't really line up with Gwen, but that seems to be who Kate is looking at.

Gwen asks Sarah if she can at least give Gwen's dead friend Cecil the ability to interact with the physical realm again, if not bring him back to life. Sarah can't, but she can detect a possible solution, and provides a portal to it. The solution is a gem, held by a bunch of dwarves in Los Angeles, being tracked by Kate Bishop. Unfortunately, Sarah's portal leaves Gwen and Cecil trapped in the trunk of a car. How can an incorporeal spirit be trapped in a car? It's the Ghost Rider's car, as he's also after the dwarves. The whole thing turns into a mess, and Cecil winds up trapped in the gem, which Ghost Rider takes off with. So Kate and Gwen will try tracking him down, and hopefully Cecil doesn't listen to the Spirit of Vengeance talking to him inside the gem.

Gwen seems to be trying to make amends for her poor and hasty decisions at the start of the series, but at the precise moment some of her other decisions are about to come back to haunt her. Not just what happened to Cecil, but also what she had Dr. Strange do to give herself a history in that world. Is it a case of how sometimes you make the best choice you can under a deadline, and have to deal with the consequences, or is it that Gwen failed to even consider the possibility of consequences? She thinks it's all a fiction, a gave she can manipulate because she thinks she knows the rules. And I think what Hastings is doing is showing there are rules in play Gwen either didn't realize existed, or didn't stop to factor in.

Haynes' art seems more simplified than it was in issue 11. That might be the thicker lines that are getting used at least part of the time. The pages with those definitely have a rougher look to them than some of the others. I thought the page where Gwen leaps into the bathtub portal looked really good, but the shading and level of detail just doesn't look as good on most other pages. The action sequences are kind of stiff. Ghost Rider seems unable to bend any of his joints in a more than minimal amount. he's swinging around these chains, but there's no sense of any exertion or movement. Ghost Rider seems like the biggest problem, and I wonder if Haynes just struggles with the character. And I have a similar feeling about Rosenberg's colors, which makes me think one of the two is affecting the other, and I can't tell which way it's going. Again though, the colors seem flatter in the second half of the book, so maybe the whole thing was rushed.

Taken on its own, not a good issue. As the starting point in a larger story, it puts a couple of interesting pieces in place. I wasn't really dying to see Gwen interact with Kate Bishop or Robbie Reyes.