Hook Jaw #5 - Titan Comics

HOOK JAW No. 5, May 2017

Much of this comic’s audience must surely have agreed with lead protagonist Maggie Reyes when the character rants at her Somalian kidnappers that “you’re pathetic!” and “You’re just awful.” However, rather than directing their bile towards Abdukadir and his murderously brutal brigand crew, it’s probably far more likely that this “Titan Comics” title’s readership were targeting their disgust at Si Spurrier’s woefully written narrative and it's appalling propensity to blatantly steal scenes from movies such as "Tremors", "Aliens" and "Jurassic Park III"; "The dummy phone... It's Jasper! It's the bug in the phone! B-But he was... I-It's... It's ins--"  

Indeed, apart from the enormous Carcharodon carcharias finally putting an end to all but the female oceanologist and thus ending the entire cast’s infuriating self-righteous whining, there genuinely seems to be little within the script for Issue Five of “Hook Jaw” that either appears original or makes any sense whatsoever. Certainly, the Englishman’s bizarre reimaging of the gigantic shark as a ‘rational-thinking’ monster of the deep, who actually halts an attack when a diver threatens to harpoon one of “her damn buddies”, is hard to mentally process. For as Mags herself remarks “That’s… that’s stupid.”

Similarly, it is genuinely difficult to fathom out just why, having killed his captors and stealthily escaped his imprisonment, Navy SEAL Klay alarmingly announces his plans to “slaughter every last one of the pirate sonsabitches” to their very faces when armed with a simple blood-stained fishing knife, or later, Ayub allows himself to die of starvation whilst holding on to the gantry of an abandoned oil rig? Admittedly, the elderly bandit was never going to try and swim for it once Hook Jaw bit out the bottom of his boat and started circling his location. But surely it would have made far more sense for the man to limp his way to a far better “dry spot” within so large a complex… and perhaps search for a source of water or food? 

Fortunately, what this twenty-two page finale does contain is plenty of grisly drawings of the “legendary” fish harassing all those foolish enough to enter the water. In fact, this publication’s one saving grace is Conor Boyle’s graphic depiction of “Flipper” circling his numerous prey as they attempt to reclaim a lost container crate from the ocean’s floor and subsequently encouraging her babies to tear Klay, Abdukadir and CIA operative Dow into eyeball-sized pieces before swimming off “into the cold.”

Writer: Si Spurrier, Art: Conor Boyle, and Colors: Giulia Brusco