 |
| MOON KNIGHT No. 8, December 2014 |
It is said that imitation is one of the greatest forms of
flattery, and this title’s new(ish) creative team of Brian Wood and Greg
Smallwood have certainly made an attempt with Issue Eight of “Moon Knight” to
mimic the innovative approach to storytelling employed by their predecessors.
But whereas the work of former writer Warren Ellis came across as a series of
fresh nervy adventures, full of invention as well as enthralling atmosphere and
dynamic action, “Live” reads as a somewhat cold and lack-lustre collection of
twenty pages whose scenes appear as choppy and confusing as the multiple
personalities which plague the titular character.
Much of this disconnection is
invariably due to the manner in which the Vermont-born author has decided to
tell this particular tale of a suicide bomber holding an office full of workers
hostage. Which, whilst certainly ‘out of the box’ as the action is followed via
the video recordings of phone cameras, robot scarab streaming feeds, security
footage and television coverage, also unfortunately provides the proceedings
with a sense of remoteness and distance that is arguably unappealing. Such a
technique also requires any dialogue to be placed outside each panel as
opposed to simply being contained within a speech bubble, and thus warrants the re-reading of certain pages just to ensure events are fully
understood. This is especially necessary when having secretly entered the
office, Moon Knight starts to schizophrenically swap between the identities of
Grant and Lockley, and it isn’t terribly clear at first just who is doing the
talking…
The plot is also somewhat sketchy and annoyingly illogical at times.
It is never made clear just what the significance of the serial numbers is
which the bomber gets one of his captives to read out at the start of the
comic. Nor does it make any sense why the masked vigilante would ask Detective
Flint to phone his Doctor “before all of this escalates out of all restraint
and reason.” What horrific wound does the hero inflict upon the terrorist in
order to give the disgruntled employee “something to remember me by” and why?
Whatever injury he sadistically caused it was certainly bloody and stupidly
seemed to play straight into the hands of the media (and his untrustworthy
physician) by giving them reason enough to label “the man in white” as “the
terrorist we need to be looking for.”
Sadly Greg Smallwood’s illustrations are
as inconsistent as the storyline, with the Kansas-based artist’s pencils,
tightly squeezed into several sequences of small rectangular panels, lacking
any great clarity or detail. Indeed, the American’s design of Lockley’s Moon
Knight costume, a black body stocking with a sculpted white face mask and chest
plate gives the character the disappointing air of being some sort of awkward
looking automaton. Not the swift-moving competent martial artist which
presumably Wood had in mind when he scripted the scene.
 |
| The variant cover art of "MOON KNIGHT" No. 8 by Declan Shalvey |
No comments:
Post a Comment