Sunday, July 29, 2018

Sunday Splash page #27

"Maybe Come Back Later, Angel" in Angel and the Ape (vol. 2) #2, by Phil Foglio (writer/penciler), Keith Wilson (inker), Carl Gafford (colorist), John Workman (letterer)

A four-issue miniseries that seems like it's trying to fit these two characters into the larger DCU. So Sam, as a telepathic ape, is connected to Gorilla City, and that place's most famous character, a certain Flash villain. Angel is the half-sister of Dumb Bunny from the Inferior Five, so they also show up. The JLI almost showed up, but they let Guy Gardner answer the phone and that took care of that.

I've never read any of the original Angel and the Ape from the '60s (I look at the prices sometimes on the site I buy comics from, and they're just a bit pricey for me), so I don't know how well this lines up with those. Foglio keeps the tone of the thing shifting. Sometimes he's using misunderstandings to create relationship melodrama, but then Grodd will attack Bunny with her worst fears to leave her sobbing and terrified. There's a cosmic MacGuffin near the end, that didn't feel like it quite fit, but I'm not sure how this group was going to handle Grodd otherwise.

Foglio's faces get a little strange sometimes, but they're very expressive, which works for the humor aspect. He draws the few brief fight scenes well, usually one-on-one fights. The one big fight scene, he opts to draw a few panels hinting at what's going on while focusing on other developments.

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