What I Bought 8/30/2020 - Part 3

Ah Labor Day, a Monday where I don't have to work. The best of all Mondays. Granting that I will probably not be able to retire before civilization collapses and "retirement" becomes a euphemism for "throat slit over cucumbers by person wearing too much leather", but I will never understand the people who want to work an actual job after they retire. I barely want to work an actual job now, fuck that nonsense when I'm in my 60s and my knees are made of paper mache.

Locke and Key: In Pale Battalions Go #1, by Gabriel Rodriguez and Joe Hill (storytellers), Jay Fotos (colorist), Shawn Lee (letterer) - Don't worry, that guy just really wants to get away from that explosion. Entirely understandable, really.

John Locke is 14, and he wants to go Europe to fight in the Great War. Thinks it goes against everything their family says they stand for to not use the keys to fight against evil. Wrong war for that, kid. World War 1 only demonstrated the ludicrous stupidity of having a crap load of alliances between every damn country.

His father catches him when he tries sneaking to Canada to enlist, but this was all part of some larger scheme where John used the music box to put his mother under his control, to get him into the vault where all the keys are. He gets the keys, ages himself up a bit, and steps through a door into Belgium. Shut the door before you get gassed and let it in the house!

The pacing is not great. Hill and Rodriguez spend like 5 pages on John's parents walking down to the Vault, with his mother making all these comments which are clearly meant to be entirely out of character for her. Just to show how John's using her to get into the Vault of Shadows. I'd rather have spent the pages watching Fiona make the raccoons do housework. Although there's got to be better things to do with the ability to command animal life than that.

Rodriguez' art reminds me a little of John Severin, or maybe Russ Heath's. Shape of the faces, the way the hair's drawn, maybe. The linework is a little lighter, thinner than for those two, but Rodriguez is also drawing mostly children and domestic scenes, not soldiers (so far). But there's an economy to the characters. I don't feel like he's wasting lines.

Wicked Things #4, by John Allison (writer), Max Sarin (artist), Whitney Cogar (colorist), Jim Campbell (letterer) - Lotte's wandered into a bizarre Tetris world. And now I'll have that music stuck in my head all day.

Turns out Charlotte was right, a heist of all the hot new smartphones was in the works. And through the magic of hiring people for temp work through apps and forging security passes, they pulled it off. Then they sell them, while the police are grudgingly accepting Charlotte's help in figuring out how and where they're at. Unfortunately (fortunately?) they're a step behind, and while Charlotte figures out it was an inside job of sorts, the mastermind accounted for that. Perks of having a twin, I suppose. There'd have to be some benefit to having a clone of yourself, short of the opportunity to commit suicide without actually dying.

Anyway, Charlotte's depressed that they didn't catch the perp, and the lady detective suggests she trying be a team player instead of showing off how smart she is, and yeah, no. Allison did not sell that POV. The cops are consistently flummoxed through this entire case, and entirely reliant on Lotte to figure out each step. At the point she's briefly lost, Detective Bohle immediately opines that the criminal's genius must be smarter than their genius, meaning Lotte. Or maybe the cops could fucking do something other than sit on their asses and glare at the girl doing all the actual detective work.

It's like one of those episodes of House where everyone's yelling at him for being so self-centered and unconventional, but he's the only one actually saving a person's life. Except I don't have a strong urge to punch Lotte in the face.

I get we are not supposed to sympathize with the cops who don't like her because they think she's a murderess, what with us knowing she isn't. But I feel like we're supposed to take the criticism of her being a showoff as a legit and the evidence just isn't there. She had this figured out last issue, told all the cops about it, which is the definition of being a team player, and they blew her off.

I'm glad Lotte's parents were able to send her some clothes, if only so Sarin can draw her in something other than the grey sweatsuit she's been in the last 2+ issues. The tealady apron is an almost passable accessory, but I'm looking forward to what Sarin comes up with as we go forward.