I originally hoped to have these comics in time for this to go up Monday, but that didn't happen. Mail service difficulties of some sort, I guess. We'll get to a pair of Marvel comics on Friday, but for today we've got one mini-series that's wrapping up, and another that's just starting.
The kaiju fight is on, but Marco figures there's still a chance to crack the safe because Mujara will lose quickly. And for a minute, he's right, and Michelle cracks the safe. At which point Pierson knifes Marco, laughs at his request to let Michelle live, and then dies in an extremely satisfying manner when the monster fight starts back up. Because Mujara didn't get the memo she couldn't win.
Seriously, Broo draws this one silent panel of a bloody smear on the wall and one of Pierson's hands stuck to it, and it was just, really good. Patrick had done a good job making Pierson an entirely unlikable (if perceptive) dick, and Broo helped that along with the obnoxious man-bun and all the sneering faces, and then they gift us with a lovely send-off. Actually, I wish Broo made that panel bigger.
So that's good. Monster fight over, backstabbing asshole dead, safe opened, everything's roses. Except for the little matter of water displacement when the beaten monster retreats to the sea. But Marco comes up with a way to protect the loot and not die. So yes, everything's good. Except for him not feeling as satisfied as he expected. But there's always another job.
I'm guessing Marco's feeling unfulfilled because he's finally completed his dream. He actually pulled off one of his ludicrous heists. But without that to drive him, he's left adrift. You'd think he could appreciate his success a little more, but humans are weird like that. As for Michelle, Marco was apparently right that she wasn't going to leave this life as she said, and she seems to have gotten a taste for more high end jobs. She's gone from being like the little sister on her crew, to setting up jobs and hiring talent. The ability to self-motivate is a valuable one.
One thing I am intensely grateful for is that this actually told a complete story, and didn't set it up as one of those things where the heist has repercussions that cause problems. You know, where Marco and Michelle have now pissed off some other powerful person by stealing his paintings, and must pull off another monster-related job to settle things. There was something I'd read in one of the solicits that made me think that was going to happen, and I was just dreading it.
But, it didn't. So, hooray!
Lilya Litvak is a Polish Jew in the Soviet Union, who, when the story begins four months after the Nazis invaded, is a flight instructor. Katya Budanova is also a flight instructor, and possibly Lilya's girlfriend. I mean, she offers her a flower (the white lily) to work into the fur collar of her flight jacket, that means something, right?
They spend their days taking young (male) pilots up in biplanes trying to teach them how to fly. They're both drafted into a new, all-women fighter squadron, although their instructor doesn't seem to think much of training women, and tells them they're really just going to be delivering planes to the front, and that they should dive and flee if they encounter Nazis.
Well yeah, a Yak-1 against an Me-109 is a huge mismatch. You had to get to like the Yak-7 before it was worth a shit. Anyway, Lilya shows what she can do, and although her Captain (the proverbial old battleaxe of a woman) is pissed, her instructor is impressed.
Poulter works a bit about Lilya's turmoil over her heritage into the story. The Soviet Union has not really been kind to Poles, or Jews. We see in a flashback (as she and Katya recite the Citizens' Pledge) they hung her father right in front of her when she was a child. Her mother is very disappointed in her for helping the Soviets. But I think Lilya figures at least the Soviets are giving her a chance to fight a different group of people who would kill her simply for existing, which is more than the Nazis would do if she were under their control. There may turn out to be more to it than that, but after one issue, I think she just really wants to be able to hit back for once.
It's interesting that while we see Lilya lose her father in her flashback, Katya's is her as a young girl being excited about seeing a plane fly overhead and getting the pilot to wave back to her. Also that her mother didn't approve (and still doesn't, since she doesn't think fighting is work for women.) So Katya might be driven more by her love of flying, and maybe the opportunity to be herself more.
One stylistic thing either Nolan or Davis does (Nolan isn't listed in the credits on the inside cover, but is listed in a small credits box on the 3rd page/title page) during flying scenes, they flip the page on its side, as in the example above. That's how it looks in the comic, like that sideways Spider-Man comic Todd MacFarlane did.
It's like a widescreen movie, probably to offer more space, the illusion of the open air the pilots are in. The pages are nice; I like that they use the cockpits or gun-sights as panel boundaries. But it's a little awkward when you turn a page, and then you have to turn the comic to keep reading, then turn it back a couple of pages later. Maybe they could have just run that across the top half of two pages, then used the bottom half for either another widescreen panel, or smaller ones if it was time to go back to a more conventional layout.
I'm curious to watch the colors in this as the story advances, because the first issue everything is surprisingly bright and clear and clean looking. But Lilya and Katya haven't been involved in the fighting yet. It's still early days, and I wonder if Espinosa will muddy things up as thing progress. I know Lilya's going to be in action near Stalingrad by issue 3, that's going to be a very different experience from avoiding a single scout plane while on a training run.
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