What I Bought 5/29/2019 - Part 2

I don't tend to think of myself as having a lot of stuff. Probably because I manage to keep most of it organized in bookshelves, unlike my dad. It hasn't reached the point where my stuff was just piled up wherever there was room, so it seems managable. Still, once I started actually moving all the longboxes, and finding enough boxes for all the books, things look a bit different. I need to learn to teleport.

For today's selections, we have one book reaching the midway point, and another on issue #2.

Ghost Tree #2, by Bobby Curnow (writer), Simon Gane (artist), Ian Herring and Becka Kinzie (colorists), Chris Mowry (letterer) - That's what happens when you stand in one place staring at your phone for too long.

Brandt is enjoying talking to the ghosts about their problems, and possibly helping a few of them.  His grandfather tries to give him some pointers, and to warn him about some of the risks. Which include demons, of a sort. The ghost with no face, called Zero, is supposed to be the one who drives the demons off, but it may have problems of its own. And Brandt receives a nighttime visit from the ghost of a girl he met the summer he spent here ten years ago. Arami doesn't know why she's still here, but maybe it has something to do with her suspicion that something's happening around here.

We're still in the early going, and things are so open at this point, I'm very interested in most everything that's happening. Not just how things work with the ghosts, and whether or not what Brandt is doing will help them move on. And not just what's going on with Zero, or how it might be resolved. Curnow brings back Brandt's cousin from issue 1, and brings her husband along for good measure. It's only two pages, but most of it is Mariko saying her husband can clean the gutters for grandma, and him absently saying, "I don't mind," while continuing to eat. Considering the decaying state of Brandt's marriage, and the fact his grandfather is most likely hanging around because he feels guilty for being so caught up in the tree he neglected his wife. It feels like a significant choice to portray it that way, but I'm not sure what it means yet.

The design for the demon is like a centipede crossed with a Xenomorph (the latter only because of the face within the mouth of the bigger face). Cool, though. For the most part, Gane is drawing regular people taking, but he does enough with the expressions, combined with Curnow's dialogue to make it work. Brandt's understated reaction to the samurai's tale, the poor guy with the melted face. Herring and Kinzie's colors help, as scenes all have their own background color. The parts with the demon are reddish hues, the conversation between the Brandt and Arami has that eerie green against a night backdrop. The conversations with the ghosts are in a placid, slightly washed out green, with a yellowish tint. It's not a warm color, but it's calm. Things are going OK when the colors are like that.

Smooth Criminals #6, by Kurt Lustgarten, Kirsten Smith, and Amy Roy (writers), Leisha Riddel (artist), Brittany Peer (color artist), Ed Dukeshire (letterer) - Brenda, pull your knee back, if your torn jeans lose any fabric, it could trigger an alarm!

The Net of Indra is being sent to new York abruptly, so the heist will have to happen sooner. Problems: Mia can't get through the motion sensors in the time allotted. The feds know she's after the Net and are trying to trick her mother into helping them. And Hatch knows she's after it, too. Basically, waaaaaay too many people know about this heist ahead of time. They actually get through the security system, despite Brenda's crush runs IT at the museum, but Hatch trips the alarms to flush Mia to the roof. His goons beat her up, he takes the prize, she and Brenda get arrested.

That went about as badly as possible, short of Mia or Brenda getting shot or blown up. I guess contact with Hatch could have given Mia an incurable disease. He strikes me as the kind of guy to contract incurable bone-itis and not warn people. Jerk. I can't imagine Mia's mother is actually stupid enough to believe the feds will honor their deal, so I'm guessing she just wanted to be reunited with her daughter so they can escape together. I hope she isn't that stupid. I mean, I know better than to trust the feds on something like that, just by virtue of having watched The Rock.

The interlude on the roof, where they stumble on the marriage proposal, was odd. I know they decide at the end of it the roof was a bad idea, and at the end of the issue it turns out, yes, running to the roof was a bad idea. I'm just not sure why they stumble on a marriage proposal. And yes, the guy's spiel was pretty awful. Do they want it to come from the heart, or have something ghostwritten? I hope that wasn't ghostwritten. If it was, he should demand his money back.

For two pages, as Mia's descending into the display while Brenda tries to keep T-Blue from figuring out what she's doing, Riddel lays out the pages to take advantage of the two being in radio contact to show things are happening simultaneously. The first page has two panels of Mia descending slowly, one above the other. They're sandwiched between panels of Brenda trying to distract T-Blue and then alert Mia. On the next page, as Mia gets spooked, one panel of Brenda is set so it overlaps the first and second panels of Mia on the page. She's in another location, but in touch with Mia, and her response carries between the span of moments in those two panels. It's something a bit out of the ordinary for Riddel, who usually does more conventional layouts. So it works well here as a brief change of pace.