 |
| THE TWILIGHT ZONE: SHADOW & SUBSTANCE No. 4, April 2015 |
Ranked in 2013 by the bi-weekly American magazine “TV
Guide” as the fourth ‘Greatest Drama Of All Time’, Rod Sterling’s television
series “The Twilight Zone” consistently fascinated an entire generation of
viewers through its wonderfully compelling episodes; be they thrillers,
fantasy, science fiction, horror or adventure stories. Unfortunately the same
cannot be said for Mark Rahner’s fourth instalment of “The Twilight Zone:
Shadow & Substance”, a comic book series marketed by
“Dynamite Entertainment” as being based upon the “classic TV anthology”. But
which in reality is disappointingly little more than a very poor imitation of
cult programme.
Much of this failure to recapture the atmosphere and
spirit of Cayuga Productions’ “critical success” is due to the veteran
journalist’s determination to make everything which happens within his
twenty-page narrative as ambiguous as possible. As a result it is never clear
to the reader just exactly what is going on. Something which becomes
increasingly frustrating as events rapidly progress and the passage of time
starts to leap forward significantly.
All that can be said with any certainty is that “the
newest resident” of an unknown alien-run facility for humans is having “some
difficulty adjusting” to his captivity. But just how “space-POW Lee” awoke from
suspended animation to find himself trapped within the ‘prison’ remains a
complete mystery throughout the issue. It isn’t even clear why his abductors
took him and not the rest of his fellow astronauts. Such unknowns may well
create an air of mystery and intrigue at the start of an adventure. But they
leave a bitter taste when they are never satisfactorily resolved by the story’s
conclusion. Has the space-traveller actually been rescued by his extra-terrestrial
captors and the planet Earth “gone”? And how long was he was actually asleep
“before they brought… [him] here?”
Just as confusing is Lee’s relationship with his fellow
inmates. “Determined to stay a stranger” the cosmonaut refuses to call any of
his colleagues by their names and keeps himself to himself. Yet somehow, in the
space of a few panels, he bizarrely manages to make the acclimatised
well-conditioned prisoner Tay commit suicide rather than remain a resident of
the “ersatz town” (or at least that’s what it looks like in the appallingly
drawn panel anyway).
Dishearteningly it is entirely possible that some of the
answers to the plethora of questions this comic generates should have been
resolved by Edu Menna’s illustrations. However the Rio Grande-born artist’s
pencils are inauspiciously inanimate at best and lack any vitality or
consistency, with wooden-looking caricatures wearing thick rectangular glasses
in one panel and then in the next miraculously having none. Consequently it is
genuinely hard to understand what is happening within some of Brazilian’s scenes,
especially when Tay kills himself or the aliens ‘inadvertently’ provide Lee
with a transporter device to (presumably) the dead Earth’s hazardous surface.
 |
| The variant cover art of "THE TWILIGHT ZONE: SHADOWS & SUBSTANCE" No. 4 by Jonathan Lau |
No comments:
Post a Comment