 |
| JUSTICE INC No. 1, August 2014 |
As a huge fan of Thirties and Forties pulp
magazine super-heroes “Justice Inc” by “Dynamite Entertainment” is a six-issue
comic book series which holds the promise of action and excitement, teaming up notable luminaries The Shadow, The Avenger and nostalgic icon Doc
Savage within a single storyline.
Understandably proud of such an achievement,
the American comic book publisher has released Issue One with several different
covers, most notably the main one by legendary painter Alex Ross. However for
once I didn’t find the 1997 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award winner’s artwork
the most enticing available, and instead plumbed for the title’s variant cover
B by Gabriel Hardman with colors by Jordan Boyd.
Unfortunately the interior
artwork by Giovanni Timpano and Marco Lesko is a major disappointment when compared
to the pencilling of any of the special covers, even the Baltimore Comicon
exclusive “artboard variant” by Ross; which consists of just the initial sketch
used for the book’s main cover. There’s simply a complete lack of consistency
with Timpano’s work throughout the issue, with the Italian artist fleetingly
capturing the James Bama Sixties paperback reprint widow’s peak look of Doc
Savage in one panel and then seemingly losing all sense of facial anatomy for
the next few pages. As result the Man of Bronze has never looked worse for the
majority of the comic despite the Toscana-born penciler having the opportunity
to illustrate the heroic adventurer as both a young and older incarnation. Indeed
if I wasn’t familiar with the look of the young explorer from the cover
illustrations of the old Street and Smith publications from the Thirties, I
wouldn’t have recognised them as the same character at all.
Michael Uslan’s
story is equally as disappointing and confusing as the plots flit from the
modern day Himalayas to 1939 New York and back again without much warning. As a
result I quickly found myself confused as to both where I was and when I was in
the story. Add to the mix that the narrative revolves around time travel and
thus moves some of the characters from one time stream to another and it is a
disorientating mess… and I haven’t even mentioned The Avenger and The Shadow
yet.
 |
| The regular cover art of "JUSTICE INC" No. 1 by Alex Ross |
No comments:
Post a Comment