It snowed yesterday while I was out in the field. In the middle of April. Lovely. A complication I did not need, to be sure. But whatever, here's a couple of first issues. Well, one is a first issue, the other is a one-shot.
Three stories in this. Fingeroth, Manley, and Sotomayor set one sometime in the first year of Darkhawk's ongoing, where he briefly tries chatting up the daughter of the crimelord he was feuding with for information, then ends up fighting a crooked cop in a super-suit out to kill her. It's fine. Fingeroth works in a lot of angst for Chris about his mother and his little brothers, about trying to do the right thing but really hating Bazin. Sotomayor's coloring makes Manley's artwork look smoother than it did on Darkhawk back in the day. Less heavy on the shading and blacks, bit less of a gritty texture to things.
Which is interesting. I'm just going off memory but I feel like the title had the look and feel of something closer to a street-level crime book, at least initially. Closer to JRJR on Daredevil than most Spider-Man titles of the time. Which makes sense, given it was mostly about Chris wanting to bring down a particular crime boss, but running into all this other increasingly crazy crap on the way.
The second story, by Abnett and Di Vito is set after Thanos Imperative, with Chris out in space trying to help people. In this case, by killing a bunch of Brood that were trying to set up in a rebuilding settlement. Chris wipes them out, but the locals prove being ungrateful shits isn't exclusive to Earth in the Marvel Universe and complain because the bar got destroyed. Cheng's coloring on the first page looks different from all the others. Almost bright to the point things look washed out. I mostly only noticed because it made Di Vito's work look a bit softer than normal, blunted some of the lines on faces. But it's only on the first page. Otherwise, it looks pretty much as Di Vito's work always does.
The story moves back and forth between the present, where a lone man named Max is searching for a child taken by some religious wackjobs, and two years earlier. In the past, he worked on a fishing boat when the first reports of a new disease started to surface. The next time we see the past, he's at his mother's rest home, which has been fortified. But not fortified enough, as one of his childhood friends crawls in, rapidly turning into a giant bug.
In the present, Max shoots a couple dogs to lure their owner into a trap. Where he dumps some toxic waste on the guy and his remaining dogs, then starts hacking pieces off with a machete to get what he wants. Delightful.
So the first issue sets up a search, as well as the question of how Max got from caring for his mother to seeking this child. I suppose you could add the question of why this happened, but Max feels too far removed from that to find answers. I suspect the "why" doesn't matter much to him, anyway.
The cities, even before the plague, all depicted as dark and quiet. Even the shot of New York City in the past is done from a remove, where the lights on the buildings are so subdued you could easily miss them. Nieto favors overhead shots or long shots, where people are either small or can't be seen at all. It makes everything seem empty, even if it reasonably can't be. Max talks in a flashback about moving his family out of the city, away from the crush and demands, so it seems like he got at least part of his wish. The cities are much quieter now.
2 comments:
Your memory of Manley's art on the original Darkhawk is correct. It has a rough, gritty feel. Not very superheroic at all, but good.
(At least based on #1. Maybe it changed later on in the series.)
I had a few issues from the first two years of the book, so I guess the pattern holds for a while. I think the coloring brightens up a little later on. Maybe as Fingeroth starts throwing in more super-villains instead of crime bosses. I know Venom shows up (because of course he does), and maybe the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants?
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