Blue Estate #10

Written by Viktor Kalvachev, Kosta Yanev, and Andrew Osborne
Art by Viktor Kalvachev, Toby Cypress, Nathan Fox, Dave Johnson, Peter Nguyen, and Kieran

I don't think there's ever been anything quite like Blue Estate.  It's a multi-faceted screwball mobster comedy with something for just about everyone.  It's getting harder and harder to explain what goes on in any given issue (all the elements are actually on the cover, if not very literally), but I'll give it a try.

Tony has to get his Italian mobster father's horse (the titular Blue Estate) to the racetrack, but he also has to meet recent widow Rachel for sex (which is really a set-up by the Russian mafia to kill him for arranging the hit on Rachel's husband, which lost the Russians a lot of money), so he has Billy, Rachel's brother who owes him cash on a real estate deal that went wrong, take care of it, but he passes the horse off to his stoner tenants so he can sell Rachel's house, in order to have the money to pay off Tony.  Got all that? 

That's not the whole synopsis though, as there is a lot more going on in this issue, as both the Russians and Italians gear up for war, and the cops prepare to make their move on all of them.  Also, we learn about the effects of second hand marijuana smoke on racehorses, and get to listen in on a mystifying conversation about a sex act known as the 'beluga' (and no, Google and Urban Dictionary were no help - if you can explain, please comment).

This book has more characters than it does artists, but the writing team never causes us to lose track of any of them, and the subtly shifting art styles continue to make each new page a treat.  This is an incredibly complicated comic, both in terms of story and the logistics of the large number of people involved in making each new issue, but it works remarkably well.  Reading this issue, it was very easy to imagine this story as a mini-series on HBO, and I think it would be excellent.