Blue Estate #3

Written by Viktor Kalvachev, Kosta Yanev, and Andrew Osborne
Art by Viktor Kalvachev, Toby Cypress, Nathan Fox, and Robert Valley

With each new issue of this series, I find myself more and more engrossed.  Blue Estate is a sprawling crime comic, with a large cast and little to no loyalty to the episodic nature of monthly comics (the last page of this comic moves to a new setting and new characters, without any apparent meaning or setting up a cliffhanger).  Normally, that would be just annoying, but somehow, it really works here.

This issue sticks with three sub-groups of characters.  Last issue ended with some frat idiots giving a stripper a hard time in a strip club owned by the son of a mob boss.  This issue begins with said owner teaching them a few things about proper strip club decorum, although it's left unclear whether or not they'll be able to ever apply these lessons.

From there, the book shifts focus to Alyosha the Lion, a crazy Uzbek drug smuggler looking to buy a lot of weapons (although he doesn't know that his apartment is being bugged).  We also get to check in with the Roy Devines.  The older one is staking out Alyosha, when the younger one appears at the stake-out van with coffee.

Kalvachev and his writing team are taking their time in building up the characters and situations that make up this comic, and that's perfectly okay with me.  They are clearly having fun with their Tarantino-esque dialogue (I love how the mob goons invoke the name of David Hasselhoff), and have a pretty big story to tell eventually.

The art continues to impress as well.  I find the shifts from one artist to the next are utterly seamless.  It feels like the various artists are really challenging each other to show off their best material, and for a book with so many people involved, it stays remarkably consistent.