This was the second issue of Before Watchmen released today in an attempt to catch-up after the utterly bizarre break that the series took over the past few weeks; unfortunately though this is not the only way in which it was a repeat, in which it was redundant. I warn you now, this review is going to be short and sharp since I really, really didn’t like what Len Wein delivered here.
Before the break I remember thinking that this Silk Spectre series was finally starting to live up to the expectations set by Darwyn Cooke’s other Before Watchmen book but all that momentum and all that good will was more than sucked away by the strange delay that has recently struck the range entire. The timing of this couldn’t be worse for Spectre which is not only the very first book back after the break, and thus the one tasked with reigniting interest, but it is also ending with this very issue. Doing this to a comic is like cutting the cinematic release of a film off just before the climax and then asking the audience to buy the DVD and find the end there amongst the deleted scenes. It’s stupid and a shame, but a strong enough story can survive it; is this such a story?
Read the rest of this entry »
Jesus Christ.
Darwyn Cooke’s artwork in this comic is so cute and almost cartoonish in its style that you can easily forget just how coarse and disturbed the content that he is depicting can get. For those wondering at home the answer to just how is that this issue is the darkest story that I have read or seen in a long, long time. More shocking than that though is the fact that it isn’t even slightly depressing because of this, instead I loved it for the bleakness of the tales tone, the barrenness of its world and the beauty with which both are rendered.
Wow! What a week for comics this has been. In one universe the Before Watchmen books were a bust, boring, but that’s certainly not the one that we live in; though I was worried it would be after issues like Nite-Owl #1. By the time that this issue started though I was thoroughly on board and the fact that it began in such a brilliantly brainy manner only helped to hook me further. Then came the cliffhanger and I was as compelled as I was confused.
Read the rest of this entry »
I heralded the first issue of this series to be the simplest, straightest, most self-sufficiently satisfying of all the Before Watchmen books, the one most likely to succeed as a stand alone story but of course it isn’t one; it’s an introduction, a pilot and not a feature length picture. So despite being a fan I had some fears about the functionality of this second issue; fears that Azarello’s intervening issue of The Comedian did little to allay.
The gritty seventies schlock that the series sends reverence to are known for aging badly in one major regard, pacing; compared to contemporary films they are stereotypically slow to the point of sluggishness, their shots linger long and spend more time on senses than story. Would the book follow in those less than ideal footsteps with its progression or deliver a dramatically potent plot? I feared that it would be the former.
I loved the cliffhanger that the second comic in this series ended on and the mystery towards its end that set that up but that was at the time I read it. Now, when I first started to flip through this third issue I honestly didn’t remember either until the narration (whose presence I could recall) reminded me explicitly. This extended cycle business is killer a month between drinks is long enough but six or more weeks simply weakens the storytelling, which is a shame because what Wein and Lee have here is an another otherwise very strong issue in a series that is staring to become known for them.
Ok, wow. I was very harsh on the first issue of this series, it seemed pointless and over-polarised to me at the time but the second seemed a little stronger and started to turn me around with its work on women and sexuality. This third issue though is not only terrific on its own terms but it brings the issues before it up a notch or two with its revelations, really lending new importance to them with its ideas. I was dreading this issue, disappointed that it was the title up this week but I ended up finding it to be one of if not the best of the Before Watchmen books thus far and the clear title of the week. And that is a big maneuver for a book to make, I mean wow, OK?
I wish that I had put down the third issue of Comedian with a similar smile on my dial, but unfortunately it was just not to be. This wasn’t as bad as issue two, but its still far from the return to form that was last week’s Silk Spectre‘s and the series needed a resurrection of that magnitude or more if it were to salvage itself from this current slump. So in short: eh, but I’ll ramble a little more about why if you want to stick around.
Silk Spectre has given me the most conflicted reading experience of the Before Watchmen books thus far: on one side it has all the proper credentials, written as it is by Darwyn Cooke and drawn by the amazing Amanda Conner, but the two issues out so far have both failed completely in capturing me. Though Silk herself is the simplest and slightest of the characters given a series (until Moloch starts in November) the story that they tell about her is both the silliest and seemingly the least necessary of the lot – which is saying something. So even though Spectre is far from the worst in the series I was still disappointed when I saw that it was the title up this week, because the other titles are at least compelling failures that allow for creative criticisms whereas so far this one had just bored me. But no more…
Read the rest of this entry »
Alan Moore’s Watchmen has been given many honors over the years and heralded for initiating many changes to the comic medium, head amongst them is the fact that it popularized both the term ‘Graphic Novel’ and the act of buying these illustrated stories as books instead of issues. For me ten times out of eleven the trade is the superior way to read any story, regardless of its artistic intent, but I’ve slowly been coming around to the way of the floppy comic.
What DC have done with Before Watchmen though really showcases the flaws in the format: the writers they hired have mostly chosen to tell their stories slowly and over the course of the entire series, which has left many of these initial issues feeling a little lackluster and to top it off the prestige nature of the product and the constantly changing population of titles means that each individual book is now parceled out once every two months at most. This is a problem because any good serialized story will contain some complicated aspects, subtle character traits, hidden clues and dramatic cliffhangers; Cooke’s Minutemen has all of those, or at least I think it did but I can’t really remember now….
