For today, we've got a pair of second issues. Two issue #2s. One I enjoyed, one not so much. So kind of a good head, bad head thing. This post is starting to feel like a Two-Face crime. Hopefully Batman doesn't come smashing through my sliding door to break my face. I don't think that's covered by renter's insurance.
The first half of the issue is to introduce us to Yuki's friends, Madesin and Bernard. "Madesin"? Really? And her father's a pastor. Why would a pastor put the word "sin" in his daughter's name? Especially when it requires such an idiotic spelling? OK, OK, deep breath breath Calvin, focus on other things. Madesin, yeesh, may be in love with Yuki, or she just may be an enthusiastic best friend. Bernard is the sarcastic, delusional one, who is apparently building himself a sexbot? A little frightened to see how that Chekov's Gun is going to go off. Yuki finally arrives carrying a huge backpack as training. Which her grandfather was hiding inside, so he could pop out and take a photo of them being surprised.
If he's that bored, you'd think he'd spend more time with online dating.
The other half of the issue is focused on the panda, who spends it monologing about everything he's gone through over the years searching for the child who bit his ear. This includes working in a call center and raking some trailer trash lady's lawn without her permission. He also gets fired from his job at the hot dog cart because he's so lost in thought he lets them get robbed. Except then he stops the thief as they run off. But he also burns his hot dog cart hat and attacks everybody, so maybe he's not cut out for customer service. And all that takes place in the same town Yuki lives, not that he knows that.
Not to sound like Ian Malcolm, but I was expecting more of Yuki fighting the panda in a book called Yuki vs. Panda. I know, I know, table-setting, character introduction, mood establishment. And the contrast between the two leads is sort of interesting. Yuki clearly never thinks about that day, though it's unclear if she ever thinks about anything at all. She admits she's stopped wondering why her grandfather is training her like this, or to what purpose. She's drifting mentally through life, while being pushed towards an unclear goal. Her expressions are most often dismay or confusion, and the weight of the crap her grandfather puts her through is literally pushing her down.
The panda, fixated on a particular humiliation, drifts physically through life. He has a clear goal, but no notion of how to achieve it. Jones draws the panda as walking through the world with his head down, wide straw hat pulled low. A sort of perpetual gloom or fog surrounds him outside brief moments of peace that are shattered by the next panel. But the world around him is bright and sunny. People are happy and laughing, but all he sees is his own misery.
And all of that is me talking out of my ass like I was Ace Ventura.
The issue opens with a brief scene from Ortensia's childhood, when her father has a disagreement with some men working for him, but tells her to learn how to read people, and that he knows a good man when he sees one. Given how Ortensia ended up, I'm going to guess he's not as good at it as he thinks.
17 years later, Ortensia and Alexander show up at a disturbing church in the middle of nowhere, looking for a missing girl. The preacher invites them in to be saved, although they'll be crucified if they refuse. So they go in, and descend into a crypt full of idiots in robes. Always encouraging, at least, it is if you're looking to re-enact any number of parts of Resident Evil 4. The loonies worship Samual, which is a red-eyed Doberman. Who just seems to bark mindlessly until Ortensia reaches for her gun. At which point it manages to say "BULLET!" So she obliges, and gives it a bullet. Cue the fight scene.
17 minutes later, everyone's dead save Ortensia, Alexander, and the head priest. Who is very happy, because they've sent everyone on to their god. He asks they do the same for him, and she basically tells him to suffer and die slow. But the girl they were after refused to join, so they'll be bringing back a corpse. Mission accomplished?
The best bit in all this is when Alexander initially refuses to go inside because he's convinced going inside a church is bad for a vampire. Which he thinks he was told by someone in Jersey in 1789. His relief when learns Ortensia is right and that's not true, replaced in the next panel by childish annoyance that he's been afraid of churches for three-quarters of a century for nothing was pretty funny. Although, this feels like a Satanist church, so I'm not sure that's the best judge of whether he could go inside, you know a Baptist church or a synagogue or whatever.
Ortensia is a little gentler with Alexander than she was in the first issue. Not a lot, but she reassures him that he can go inside the church, and that she wouldn't lie to him. It's a bit of a softer moment for her, not quite saying she wants him there to have her back, but implying it. Otherwise, Hahn draws her with a fairly neutral expression until there's violence to be done. A distinct contrast from Alexander's increasingly nervous look as they're surrounded and told to kneel. She's trying to follow her father's suggestion. Watch the people she's dealing with, and having judged the kind of people they are, wait for the proper moment to act.
I'm really enjoying these done-in-one stories, and Southard is sprinkling in other things that I assume are going to build to something by the end. For example, that both Alexander and Ortensia have died previously. Not a surprise with the vampire, and maybe not for her, either, given the skeleton horse, but I'm definitely curious.
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