What I Bought 10/7/2020 - Part 2

Showing a familiar inability to learn from past mistakes, I'm doing Sketchtober again. This year, I'm trying to do all the Marvel and DC characters I highlighted in my "Favorite Characters" posts. Yes, that only adds up to 29, but it gives me a couple days wiggle room (one of which I already used last week). Anyway, it's going as well as it usually does, which is to say my imagination exceeds my talent.

Spy Island #1 and 2, by Chelsea Cain (writer), Lia Miternique (cover artist/designer/supplemental art?), Elise McCall (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - I still like the pulp paperback look of that cover.

So there's an island in the Bermuda Triangle where a lot of spies hang out, for some reason. Schmoozing at fundraisers to protect mermaids, which are a thing in this world. And they eat, small, unwary German children. Nora Freud is a spy, although I couldn't tell you who she works for. She killed a man, for reasons I don't know. Her father, who she claims is dead, is posing as a Quebecois Separatist mime. her sister Connie shows up after the mermaid attack because she works for the Institute of Marine Cryptozoology. Nora's got some sort of back-and-forth going with a guy who wears briefs with the Union Jack on them, so I assume he's meant to be a James Bond knockoff. But given I'm far from an expert on the fictional spies, I may be playing in the wrong kiddie pool here.

I'm not sure at all what's going on. There may be a kraken lurking in the waters off the island, which is apparently unusual, but common enough the tourist trade has a dumb party to "call" it out. I have the impression Nora's Brit fling is after her father, and that Nora may have tried to drown her sister when they were younger. It's possible Nora killing a guy at the start of the story gave a mermaid the taste for human flesh, and that's why the little kid died. Maybe? Probably not.

 

Beyond that, I don't know. I assume there are layers and layers beneath the deliberately cheesy innuendo and the pages done up to look like a memorandum or a drink menu. There's one page that is literally the word "SEX" written in big, neon green letters from bottom to top of the page. Because it happens, but it doesn't actually mean anything to the story, so just acknowledge it happened and move on quickly as possible. Not sure why we need the innuendo beforehand, then, but it's fine. It makes sense in the story (at least something does).

The double-page splash of the Kraken emerging from the ocean to eat 50 people in 1926 was pretty cool. No complaints on that front. McCall makes her characters look basically realistic. Nobody's impossibly fit or proportioned, they all show their age at times, except maybe Connie but I think she's a bit younger than everyone else. I don't know if the design for the mermaids was her idea, Miternique's Cain's, or taken from mythology, but it's cool. Definitely emphasizes them as a potential predator.

Rosenberg uses these extremely bright colors that work in different ways depending on the setting. In the outdoors, they seem to make the island seem almost magical. The tropical paradise everybody talks about. Indoors, it becomes this garish thing that reminds you the tropical paradise was turned into a fucking tourist trap and is a complete nightmare.

I think my biggest question, halfway through this mini-series, is whether things are going to make sense at the end. I'm sure there will be explanations for some things (unless this is one of those stories where nothing gets answered because it only works that way in stories or whatever), but will the explanations make sense.