I'd hoped to have more comics to discuss in this round, but I couldn't find a copy of the first issue of You Promised Me Darkness, and the first issue of Jenny Zero, which was originally supposed to be out two weeks ago, is only just out today. So one book is what you get.
Lilya goes from winning her first dogfight to getting the instructor she beat to take her to bed. Lady who knows what she wants and gets it. It leaves her friend Katya pining, and one of the other pilots, Raisa, jealous. That goes on for six months, and then they're sent to Stalingrad, because most of the air units there are dead. Lilya shoots down a plane in their first real battle, and she Katya, and two other pilots are transferred to the same squadron as Alexi, the instructor she beat. Who Lilya's been keeping up a long-distance relationship with. No time for her to focus on that, because they're really going to get mixed up in the madness of Stalingrad very soon.
Davis continues to use the sideways page approach for the air combat scenes. I think it works better in this issue, because now Lilya's mixed up in huge dogfights with dozens or hundreds of other planes, so it allows for him to simultaneously show the scale of the fight, but have room to focus on smaller details within it.
It becomes like a vertical double-page splash, where the backdrop is all the other planes flitting around, with Lilya or someone else occasionally in the midground. Then Davis intersperses smaller panels throughout that zoom in on a particular bit of action, or show the perspective from that fighter's cockpit (and he draws some of those panels in the shape of the cockpit glass).
There's also a page where Raisa makes a snide comment about Lilya constantly receiving letters from Alexi, where Davis spends six panels on Lilya pulling out papers, rolling the letter up in them, lighting it, and taking a puff. Then at the bottom of the page, she blows the smoke in Raisa's face. I like the deliberate step-by-step approach there, showing how far she's going for this brief, but satisfying bit of spite.
The bad news is, at the end of the issue there's a note from Poulter that Davis passed away not long after his finished this issue. Which is sad for a lot of reasons, obviously, beyond him not getting to finish this series. That's a low note to finish a review on, but it feels odd to go on discussing the differences in Wong and Greenhalgh's inking styles after that.
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