Sometimes with these, I'm caught between what looks like the more interesting page, and what better represents the series. Today, I went with the first option, because I didn't really want to post a page of Spartan saying he now owns a car factory. I plan to go the other direction in a couple of weeks.
The previous volume ended with Spartan learning that the dimension Void and Noir were exploring was a source of nearly limitless energy. Batteries of all sizes that never ran out of power, and could, in fact, remove the need for internal combustion engines. From there, Casey and Nguyen explore Spartan's attempts to use this to improve the world, and how the world - or at least the people who fancy themselves the movers and shakers of it - respond.
Since Casey shuffled most of the cast off into one ending or another in the previous volume, there's really just Spartan and Grifter for this book to focus on. Spartan is moving forward, focused on making lots of these new batteries, and later on, cars that use said batteries as fuel cells. He's also focused on product placement in movies and ad campaigns, really saturating the market. Truly noble pursuits.
Grifter, meanwhile, is still clinging to the old life. Getting into gunfights, helping kidnap a major arms dealer/information broker's son back from his crazy FBI agent father, that kind of shit. Even when the injuries he sustains in the fight pictured above sideline him physically, he finds ways to keep a hand in. First by dragging one of Halo's accountants into it as his proxy, later by piloting Maxine Manchester's body remotely like an Iron Man suit.
Yeah, the treatment of Maxine doesn't get any better in this volume than in the previous one. We get some vague assurance her sentience is stored on a server somewhere while Grifter co-opts her body, but there's apparently been no effort to help her. Worse, Spartan had his ad people gimmick up some chibi -fied monstrosity as the company mascot to pop up in all their commercials.
I am again confused on what Joe Casey expects me to conclude from all this. We also get a delightful bit where one of Spartan's other accountants snaps and straight kills a man on the freeway because he's frustrated over losing control of his life. Spartan basically erases all the evidence and makes it look like the victim was killed elsewhere. Am I supposed to conclude he feels a measure of responsibility for messing up this guy's life so completely in his grand design, or that he just thinks the guy is a useful pawn?
Agent Wax, who Casey introduced in the previous volume, acts as Spartan's man within the government, while also using his hypnotic powers to fuck his boss' wife. There's some brief handwave by Wax that she wouldn't be as susceptible if she weren't into it that I hope we're meant to read as Wax justifying his actions to himself, and he eventually falls in love with her to the point he kills her husband and assumes his identity (which means he's hypnotizing everyone all the time to see him as that guy?) Still, pretty creepy. and again, Spartan seems aware of this, but largely gives zero fucks beyond the fact that Wax's ruse gives him greater access to government information. For as much as Spartan disapproves of what Grifter's getting up to, he's just as willing to use people and play with their lives in pursuit of his grand motives.
Yet, as I talked about elsewhere, Casey takes the "enlightened billionaire technocrats will save us" view here, which probably seemed quite intelligent in 2002, but looked laughable five years ago when I wrote that first post, and isn't any less so now. Clean, non-fossil-fuel based energy sources are a good thing, but as Spartan is leveraging capitalism for all its worth, there is still the matter of people needing jobs to have money to pay bills. He is putting a lot of people out of work, in a story which takes the viewpoint that governments are largely useless and more interested in protecting their own power, therefore unlikely to help those people.
Dustin Nguyen and Tom Friend are the penciler/artist team for the first 16 issues. Nguyen is a ways off from the more simplified, angular style he adopted on various Bat-books and Descender. You can see similarities in the shapes of characters' faces, but the work is closer to a hyper-detailed approach. Lots of little lines on faces. While there are a fair number of scenes with the same sorts of heavy shadows Sean Phillips favored, they still aren't as common in this volume, reserved for places behind the scenes. Private deals and plans, usually involving Grifter. Out in public, Spartan is Jack Marlowe, benevolent corporate bigwig. Buying ad time in the Super Bowl and buying movie studios and insisting they used Halo Corp cars in their movies. All still very manipulative and grabbing all the levers of power, but in a bright and aboveboard manner.
I'm coming to the conclusion I may be too cynical to properly enjoy this book.
While Phillips drew Spartan's silver business suit very differently from everyone else's clothes, emphasizing its alien origin (since it's part of what used to be Void), Nguyen tends to render it like a particularly shiny piece of clothing. Maybe because Spartan's had more time to get accustomed to it, to accept the benefits and the power as he has this idea of running a corporation. A suit fits him better now.
I don't know if Casey got editorial pressure or what, but the the books moves away from all the political maneuvering for the final arc, when Grifter pulls in a bunch of characters from the series (and controls Maxine's body remotely) to help rescue Zealot from the current leadership of the order she founded millennia ago. Duncan Rouleau is drawing the book as it returns to something closer to what the book was originally, and his work is a little wilder and more energetic than Nguyen. Nguyen can do wild-eyed emotion very well, but his violence tends to be rougher, more focused on how bruised and battered people get doing this stuff. Roueleau's seems closer to, "holy shit, that guy got his arm blown off!" Spartan does end up helping, but even then, he seems so damn irritated to have to do something.
Maybe they needed to program a little more loyalty into the guy.
No comments:
Post a Comment