Saturday, October 24, 2009

Elephantmen #22

Written by Richard Starkings
Art by Andre Szymanowicz


You really can never guess what you're going to get with an issue of Elephantmen. Last issue was a huge violent fight-fest, but this issue is a nice quiet, character driven affair, highlighting Starking's strength in character development, while suffering from highly uneven pacing, an abrupt ending, and a strong sense of decompression.

That said, the character moments win the day here. I loved the street vendor making soup, and enjoyed the scenes with Miki, Hip, and Ebony.

I don't understand what's going on with this book in terms of overall plotting. Is this 'Dangerous Liaisons part 7 of 8', or 'Seven Days of Smog part 1'? Can you be part of two arcs at the same time? Seeing as there was no 'liaising' in the last issue, I'm not sure if this is really an arc at all. And will '7 Days of Smog' take seven issues? Normally, I don't care about this stuff, but these are the questions I always end up with when I read this title.

The art this issue, by Szymanowicz, is very nice, looking very European in places.

1 comment:

Richard Starkings said...

I think of the DANGEROUS LIAISONS story arc as a a season (all the individual issues have story titles too), and the 7 DAYS OF SMOG story as the two part season finale!