6/24/2023 0 Comments Vicious circle 2009Even when events aren't jumping from one era to another, Bermejo shows his mastery of layouts and composition. It's the same story, the same violent conflict unfolding across history. Altering his style for each era emphasizes that bleak thematic undercurrent. The way Bermejo depicts each period with a drastically different style in each panel is stunning to the extent that it almost feels like he is showing off, but it's more than a vain artistic flourish. There's one two-page sequence where Ferris kills again and again as he tries to land at the right point in time to flip the switch on the doomsday device. Both combatants acknowledge that neither of them knows what will happen if one kills the other, and the question lingers ominously over the plot as if Chekhov himself hung it there.īermejo alters his style with each time-hop to reflect the art or aesthetic of the era and, at times, pays homage to other artists. Readers learn that whenever one of these trained assassins kills, it triggers a jump that sends them together to a seemingly random time and place. A panel in which Ferris, looking out towards the reader, encourages Thacker to question which of them is the hero hints at the explanation being something unexpected. Ferris' muttering about how the fabric of the universe has cancer acts as the most significant and bleakest clue, and one assumes answers will come in future issues. Why such a thing exists and why anyone would want to trigger it remains unclear. Ferris made the trip to turn on the device. Thacker traveled through time to destroy a world-ending machine created by the Kang Turing company. They're time travelers from different times, but whether that means different eras or timelines is uncertain. The focus on revenge leaves much of Thacker and Ferris' story a mystery implied by their dialogue and actions. Right now, we're doing a John Wick-style revenge story through time. He killed my boy." In other words, don't worry about the sci-fi stuff yet. Thacker's internal recap concludes with, "Who gives a fuck. Starting the story with Thacker having a family before wrenching him away from them injects cheap pathos into the narrative, which doesn't allow readers to dwell much on the many unanswered questions and unexplained details that created this time-hopping rivalry. It's a quick rundown of Thacker and Ferris' conflicting missions that raises more questions than it provides answers. Thacker's narration (which letterer Becca Carey puts to page sans caption box throughout, helping to emphasize that Thacker does not belong in any of these periods) catches readers up on the plot thus far, to an extent.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |