Saturday, April 01, 2023

Saturday Splash Page #66

 
"Die Streaming," in Two-Step #3, by Warren Ellis (writer), Amanda Conner (penciler), Jimmy Palmiotti (inker), Paul Mounts (colorist), Ken Lopez (letterer)

So, yeah, Warren Ellis is the writer for this, and he's turned out to be a huge creep, so this may understandably be a non-starter for some people. I mean, if you want to look at Amanda Conner's art, which was my primary reason for picking this up in back issues maybe 10 years ago, there are plenty of other things she's drawn that weren't written by Ellis.

The art would be the selling point here. The story, such as it is, involves Rosi, an extremely popular online personality who films every second of her life as she travels through some future version of London which seems to be a hodgepodge of a dozen different stereotypical cultures. So there's a neighborhood that breaks into Bollywood dance numbers, and Chinatown is filled with John Woo-style gunfight choreography. Conner takes these opportunities to fill panels with lots of details of people going about their lives, often taking advantage of the multiple cameras Rosi employs to show additional angles or details in smaller panels running with a larger panel (as in the above example).

Rosi's bored off her ass by all of it until she crosses paths with Tony Ling, a gangster hired by one gang to steal some sort of oversized, pneumatic cock the leader of a different gang ordered. Rosi tags along and ends up getting hunted alongside Tony. Tony seems to be trying to reach a state of Zen, and is a coolly sarcastic guy in a dark suit who smokes cigarettes and shoots people. In other words, typical Ellis protagonist. Rosi is more wildly dressed, more loudly sarcastic and profane young woman who says things like, 'I hate him so much I can taste it in my womb.' They are at one point menaced by a large young man named Ron, who due to some cyberlink to his eyes, sees people as cars. This is bad, because he enjoys fucking cars. Until they explode.

The sophomoric mania of the book will either work for you, or make you roll your eyes. Or possibly one, then the other. But the Conner/Palmiotti/Mounts art team is a good one, so it looks nice.

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