I didn't track down all the comics from last month I wanted, but I managed to find five so far, which isn't bad, these days. Let's start it off with the last issue of a mini-series.
Question: The Deaths of Vic Sage #4, by Jeff Lemire (writer), Denys Cowan (penciler), Bill Sienkiewicz (inker), Chris Sotomayor (colorist), Willie Schubert (letterer) - Can Vic bleed through that mask, or does it just get trapped against his face underneath it? That would be unpleasant.Vic's back in the present, and it's still chaos in Hub City. He's convinced he has to face this devil, Tot says he's being an idiot and that Vic Sage needs to get on the air and try to get people to calm down. Vic goes on the air and encourages people to fight back against injustice, without burning everything down. He also reveals himself as the Question on live TV. Good thing nobody watches network news, anymore.
He blows up the abandoned building that started all this, but his target isn't there, so he heads for the Mayor's office. At which point the Question kicks the shit out of a bunch of cops in riot gear. That was fun. He tries to convince the mayor to do the right thing, guy shoots himself instead. The "devil" shows up talking shit, Myra blows his head off. Which doesn't do a thing for all the rioting and everything else going on in the streets, to Vic's despair. But he puts the Question mask back on and goes to do. . . something.
I get that Lemire probably doesn't want to do a story where all the problems are solved by the costumed vigilante beating up one guy. But then what is the point? That Vic is screwing up by deciding he's just going to be the Question? That he can do more to address the actual systemic is as Vic Sage, investigative reporter, and that by trying to rely on punching dudes he's just playing into the "devil's" hands? The devil's got him so fixated on how they keep doing this dance life after life that Vic ignores the big picture?
I feel like the panels on the second and third pages from the end are out of sequence. Or the lettering is in the wrong boxes. Vic falls to his knees in front of a puddle and triggers the gas to attach the mask and stands up as Tot asks him if he thinks he's special. But on the next page, he's back on his knees staring into the puddle and responding to Tot's question. So I don't know if he lost hope briefly again in one panel, or if the question about him being special was supposed to be in the panel where he was still on his knees, and he gets up afterward. Were the panels supposed to run across the two pages, or read one, then the other? I don't know.
Other than that, a lot of tall, narrow panels. Especially during the scenes in the Mayor's office. They aren't necessarily zoomed in on a character's face, so I think, since those scenes heavily involve Marlick, the devil, it's supposed to make you feel trapped with him. There's no getting out and away from him, from what he's saying, from what he's planning. Most of the panels in Vic's scenes aren't that way. Some of them are very compressed, spread out the width of the page, but short, and others are somewhere in between. Things are shifting for him. He has new information, about himself and his enemy, and he's making decisions about his life that could be a major shift.
When the two of them are together, the panel shapes move back-and-forth depending on who has the upper hand. Tall and narrow when Marlick's got the edge, shorter and wider when Vic's fighting back. That's pretty much all I have on this.
No comments:
Post a Comment