Black Science #6 – Review

By: Rick Remender (writer), Matteo Scalera (art), Dean White (colors) and Rus Wooton (letters)

The Story: Grant McKay and Co. are stuck in another hostile environment.

Review (with SPOILERS): I’m really happy with where this series stands as it heads into a short hiatus (presumably to allow Matteo Scalera to work ahead on the art).  Mostly, it’s just rewarding to see that Remender isn’t totally committed to the cookie-cutter stereotype characters that he created earlier in the series.

The revelation that Kadir and Grant might not really be the characters we originally thought is very refreshing.  I really didn’t want this series to be about the noble crusading scientist who is beaten down by the evil venture capitalist.  Who needs that type of class-warfare story?  If you want class warfare, it is being done tremendously well by Greg Rucka over in Lazarus.  So, it is refreshing to see that Kadir isn’t as villainous as he was originally portrayed, nor is Grant McKay as wonderful as we were lead to believe.  That doesn’t mean that this will be a role reversal with Kadir being the hero.  In fact, I hope it doesn’t end up that way.  Stories are more interesting when there aren’t defined heroes and villains.  Humans have a variety of competing compulsions and storytelling that limits people to being purely good/evil is tiresome.  Kadir seems to be financially motivated, but he’d also rather not have reality destroyed.  Grant kinda wants to make the world better, but like most scientists…..he falls into that trap of being more interested in his own research and then feels the need to rationalize a story that makes that research vital to humanity.  These characterizations of Kadir and Grant now ring true with both the scientists and venture capitalists I know.

Also interesting was this concept that Grant is polluting all of reality with his Pillar devices.  Here we see Grant and Kadir run into another Pillar under construction by the chief scientist of this bizarre Possessed Ape species.  This ape probably didn’t get the idea from THIS Grant McKay, but the implication is the all of the Grant McKays are a scourge on reality as they flit about in their Pillars causing mayhem.  It reminds me a little of the argument that time travel is impossible…..because if it WERE possible, someone from the future would have invented it and we’d have time travelers wandering all over the place in present day.

Black Science #5 – Review

By: Rick Remenber (writer), Matteo Scalera (art), Dean White (painted art) and Rus Wooton (letters)

The Story: Grant has to deal with a mysterious, masked assailant.

Review (with SPOILERS): Last issue of this series put it right back on the top of my reading stack.  It was fast and furious and ended in a really cool place with a nifty-looking villain (?) appearing to possibly menace Grant McKay and our heroes.

This issue wastes no time dragging out the mystery of this masked man, it’s Other Grant.  It would be wrong to think of him as Future Grant who is on a sort of Back to the Future mission to help out.  No, this is just Other Grant from another reality who somehow has knowledge about the normal sequence of events that takes place in alternate universes.  Except in Other Grant’s native reality, his Pillar exploded and killed his children and now he seems to be on a mission to stop Our Grant from killing his kids.

Black Science #4 – Review

By: Rick Remender (writer), Matteo Scalera (art), Dean White (colors) and Rus Wooton (letters)

The Story: The protagonists try to escape from an alt-WWI while their leader is wounded.

The Review (with SPOILERS): Honestly, I don’t know what to make of this silly comic series.  The first issue was lights-out great!  The second issue was good, but concerning.  The third issue was kinda mediocre.  And, now we’re back to lights-out great.

If I had to give an opinion on this series it is that it will be somewhat inconsistent, but capable of blowing your socks off.  That alone makes it worthy.  Life is too short to even bother with comics that don’t have the potential for greatness.  That’s why I don’t usually bother with 3rd-tier Avengers books anymore: no potential for greatness.

There are a whole raft of attributes that make this a sharper issue than last:

• WOW-level art: I took some stick last month for saying the art is issue #3 wasn’t quite as good as the previous issues.  I stand by that assessment.  This issue (like issue #1) is just loaded with images that will melt your eyes.  For me, there are two levels of good art.  One is just having the basic storytelling correct and not succumbing to weak panels.  That is a harder task that you might think with so much frenzied action – but Scalera is up to the task.  The second level is: Are there images that just have that singular quality where you go, “WOW!”?  I started to make a list of the panels that made me double-take, but it would probably be easier to list the panels that didn’t cause that reaction.  There are original pages in this issue that I want and I’m irritated that Matteo Scalera’s art rep doesn’t have them up on the site yet.  I won’t tell you which ones because I can’t take the chance that other people might buy them.  It’s inspirational art.  So, what sets this art apart?  It’s just got that little bit of extra energy to the whole sequence when Ward is fighting his way through the Techno Native Americas.  The art looks incredibly like that of Sean Murphy.  Everything is energetic, well-framed and detailed.  Then, we shift gears totally and see that Scalera can draw an incredibly soft-looking pretty woman AND imagine a world that is straight out of Star Wars.  Who knows why the art wasn’t quite to this standard in the last two issues?  Maybe Sclera had something going on in his personal life that knocked him off schedule, maybe the subject matter didn’t excite him as much…Who knows?  And who cares, because any series that can look like THIS is worth reading.
• Shift away from Grant McKay: I have a feeling that Grant McKay is going to be the Rick Grimes of this series.  By that I mean, central character who I don’t like as much as the supporting cast.

Black Science #3 – Review

By: Rick Remender (writer), Matteo Scalera (art), Dean White (colors) and Rus Wooton (letters)

The Story: More background on the Pilar project.

Review (with SPOILERS): This issue is a perfect example of why I hate to see fans proclaiming a series as “great” after an exciting first issue.  So much can go wrong or change in the space of a few issues, that you really need to see a little more before registering a definite opinion on a series.

Where this issue goes wrong is in how far away from the original premise it has gotten after only a few issues.  That first issue was just electric.  We were dumped into the middle of this bizarre aquatic planet with frogmen and fishmen doing battle and some astronaut dude was running for his life.  Nothing was explained and we mostly had to figure it out ourselves.  Then – JUMP – we ended up on some weird future-tech planet at the end of the issue.  It almost seemed like this series could just be folks hopping around and trying to get home: cool world after cool world.  It felt really fast-paced and – screw the back-story – because those frogmen with the electric tongues were SO COOL.  Oh yeah…..and the art was incredible.

The second issue was a deviation from the first in that we started getting more backstory on the characters and less of the fantastical world they were exploring.  That wasn’t good.  And lots of the characters we really stereotypy.

Black Science #2 – Review

By: Rick Rememder (writer), Matteo Scalera (art), Dean White (colors) and Rus Wooton (letters)

The Story: Grant McKay & Colleagues find themselves stranded on another strange world.

Review (with SPOILERS): When the first issue of a new series is as electric as the first issue of Black Science, it is always interesting to see how the next couple of issues shake out.  You always wonder if the comic will be AS good now that you’re expecting awesomeness.

The final analysis is that this issue is good, but not as incredible as the first issue.

The main difference is that the art isn’t given as many opportunities to sing.  The first issue found our protagonists stranded on this bizarre aquatic world where they encountered battling frog-men and fish-men.  It was full of pictures of these weird alien creatures and featured all sorts of opportunities for Dean White to whip out some really electric colors.

Black Science #1 – Review

By: Rick Remender (writer), Matteo Scalera (art), Dean White (colors) and Rus Wooton (letters)

The Story: A scientist trapped on an alien world in a parallel dimension tries to escape hostile aliens and save his family.

The Review (with SPOILERS): This is the most electric #1 issue I’ve read in a while.  I won’t say it is “the best ever” because there’s too much hyperbole in comic reviewing and I don’t have comprehensive notes in front of me allowing me to compare it to Saga #1 or East of West #1 or American Vampire #1 (or many of the other exciting #1s of recent memory).  Still… I’m tempted to say that I liked Black Science more than any of those just because it is so darn electric.  I you didn’t have this on your pull list, do yourself a favor and check it out.

The thing that really puts this issue over the top is the art from Matteo Scalera and Dean White.  I guess Scalera has been around the Marvel Universe for awhile, doing issues of Deadpool and Secret Avengers (the old series).  More recently he’s been doing some work on Indestructible Hulk.  If you look at the original pages from those series, you see some nice art, but nothing that prepares you for THIS.  I mean, the art in Black Science is off the chain.  It’s nuts.  There is a lot about Scalera’s art that reminds me of Sean Murphy.  It isn’t just that some of his characters and layouts looks very like something Murphy would do (I bet they’ve hung out and compared notes), it’s the way that Sclera is able to mix cartooning and realism in a panel and not have it look weird.  The characters are cartoony…..so they can overact, emote and really demonstrate action.  But the environment they find themselves in is largely rooted in realism.  It’s a very difficult balance to pull off and most artists can’t do it.  Do you remember that old Simpsons episode there Bart and Lisa both work for the local TV news?  Lisa is technically correct compared to Bart, but Bart is more popular because they say he has “zazz”.  It’s kinda like that: Sclera has zazz!  It’s almost like some artists have a charisma to their art that takes it to another level.  Scalera has “it”.

The colors are also really something else.  Dean White has been around for awhile, so we know that he can color a comic book, but this is still very arresting.  I’m a dunce when it comes to color theory, so I won’t even try to talk about complimentary colors and all that stuff.  Let’s just say that there are a LOT of colors in Black Science #1 that you won’t typically see in a comic, much less see them all on the same page.  Electric pink, electric blue, electric green…  Wow!

Even the lettering is next-level stuff…