Mind the Gap #15 – Review

By: Jim McCann (story), Rodin Esquejo & Dan McDaid (art), Jessica Kholinne & Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: Elle Peterssen gets a bad case of comic book death.

The Review: When McCann first revealed to us the nature of Elle’s condition, I don’t think we ever appreciated how psychologically devastating it could be for her.  On paper, the idea that you can return from the dead sounds pretty good.  Hey—sign me up!  What we didn’t account for was the unpredictability of this deal.  Imagine knowing that at any second you can die for no reason whatsoever, only to come back and having to experience that fear again and again.

Well, that would be how most of us would experience it, I imagine.  Elle has a different angle on the situation.  It’s not the permanence of death she fears—obviously, since she seems to be pushing for it here.  The issue opens with Elle musing on the Arctic Woolly Bear Moth’s resurrection (so to speak) cycle and how it climaxes in metamorphosis, finally achieving the life it’s always meant to have.  Elle sees her own cycle of death as eroding not only her ability to live freely, but her identity also.

Mind the Gap #14 – Review

By: Jim McCann (story), Rodin Esquejo & Dan McDaid (art), Arif Prianto & Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: Like the Duracell Bunny, Elle keeps on going and going and going and going…

The Review: When this story began with Elle in the Garden, your natural inclination was to believe that someone put her there on purpose.  But now that we’ve found out the true purpose of Jairus is to make her ripe for resurrection, all the creepy psychic powers she’s shown afterward appear to be an exciting bonus.  In that case, we have, as I noted last issue, some new questions about how Elle’s out-of-body abilities will tie into the plan to make her immortal.

While you hope that McCann will reveal a more specific purpose for the Garden in time, right now it serves as the sole means for Elle to resist her mother and grandfather’s plans.  If one thing has been made clear about Elle, she’s headstrong—literally and figuratively.  The way she ended up in this state to begin with was a result of her determination not to let Min and Erik have everything go their way, and she carries that determination to an extreme at the end of the issue.  It may not foil them completely, but it’s enough that she frustrate their masterwork.

Mind the Gap #13 – Review

By: Jim McCann (story), Rodin Esquejo & Dan McDaid (art), Arif Prianto & Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: Elle remembers what happened at the subway, and it is not lawsuit-worthy.

The Review: It all comes down to that fateful, rainy night on a subway platform.  That is, after all, where this story started.  The mystery of exactly what happened to Elle just before she ended up comatose has kept us tantalized for a good long time, and McCann has definitely milked the whole thing for all the intrigue it could spare.  You’re at the point where you feel as though once you know the truth of that incident, you’ll know everything.

But even though Elle finally recounts the whole ordeal with firsthand details, you’re chagrined to discover that the subway accident is not everything—not even close.  While it’s clear that Elle knows much more about what’s happening to her and why than you’ve previously believed, you the fact that her memories are coming in piecemeal and out of order sets a firm cap on how much McCann chooses to reveal before he’s good and ready.

Mind the Gap #9 – Review

By: Jim McCann (story), Rodin Esquejo & Dan McDaid (art), Arif Prianto (colors)

The Story: Here there be monsters under the bed—or frightened women, whichever one.

The Review: I would’ve been more intrigued by McCann’s announcement that this would be a silent issue had it not been for the fact that Batman and Robin had such an issue last month.  That not only wears down the initial novelty of the thing; now we’re going to instinctively want to hold up the two issues side by side and see how they stack up against each other, even though they’re completely different products.  That’s our competitive nature for you.

Ultimately, Batman and Robin made better use of silence in its story and also had better reason to use it.  In depicting the aftermath of Robin’s death, silence seemed to embody the wordless grief that comes after someone dies, making the lack of text naturally profound.  Here, silence is used merely to heighten suspense—that is, where suspense already exists.  In fact, for the first half of this issue, the lack of dialogue or sound feels more happenstance than purposeful.  The only way to describe the difference is that the story in Batman and Robin needed silence, whereas Mind the Gap didn’t need sound.

T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #10 – Review

By: Too many to list—check out the review.

The Story: You ever get the feeling your mother’s holding something back from you?

The Review: Back in the olden days, whenever that was, heroes were the good guys and villains the bad, and hardly ever, if not never, did the twain meet.  Nowadays, members from both classes come in degrees, which makes getting a handle on them a little harder, but definitely a lot more interesting.  As Gail Simone’s superb Secret Six shows, we get no end of intrigue trying to figure out just where in the scale of humanity a character falls.

So it makes perfect sense that the Agents, who each want to use their powers for personal redemption, have no greater enemy than Iron Maiden, a woman who has absolutely no interest in redeeming herself.  Nick Spencer portrays her as a woman seemingly incapable of remorse, with an almost monstrously finite level of affection.  Whatever connection she had to husband Dynamo, it clearly does not extend to his values or loved ones, as we see in grisly detail.

Her callous actions force you to wonder if she feels pain at all.  When she charges Bill Henry that, “My husband is dead.  You killed him,” her tone has no chill to indicate an emotional stake in the statement, but the barren bluntness of fact.  Upon disposing of him, I. Maiden actually smiles as she says, “Give my love to Len.”  This is not the curse of a vengeful widow; this is the ironic remark of a villain, an idle curse for her enemy to join his comrade.

So by all appearances, Colleen’s conclusions about her mother seem correct.  A woman with such little regard for human attachment could never find satisfaction in domestic felicity alone.  That said, we have an interesting implication that murder doesn’t necessarily satisfy the Maiden either.  Rather, the act and challenge of killing occupies her soul in a way homemaking can’t.  In Colleen’s words, Maiden does what she does because “You were bored, weren’t you?”

In spite of these insights and the tough exterior with which Colleen delivers them, we can plainly see in her increasingly pained interrogation (“Go on, then.  Tell me I’m wrong…  Tell me you were forced to…  Tell me something.  Tell me anything.”) a desperation to grasp at any pearl of genuine love her mother might have for her.  Like the final nail in the coffin, Maiden denies her with the kind of mockery we’ve come to expect: “You always did cry too much, girl.”

Superman 80-Page Giant 2011 – Review

By: Too many to list—you’re better off reading the review.

The Story: Jor-El does Mission Impossible; Perry White takes a shot with Wildcat; the many lives of Jimmy Olsen; the inconsistent grammar of Bizarro World; Supergirl’s ten-second boyfriend; Lois Lane’s good deed; and Superboy, the Werewolf Slayer!

The Review: Annuals may be a grab bag of mixed features, they’ve got nothing on these “giants” DC likes to put out now and then.  You can’t always take them too seriously, but they’re often a surprisingly good showcase of unknown or rising talent in DC’s ranks.

Jor-El’s adventure into Krypton’s core starts off strong and has some great thrills, but his stream-of-consciousness narration drags the pace down.  Had Bud Tidwell more page-time, all his Krypton continuity might have paid bigger dividends, but mostly they’re distracting.  Still, you can’t go wrong with Cafu on art duties; from Jor-El’s expression of relief on his successful escape to Krypton’s skyline at night, everything’s just beautiful to look at.  And let’s just agree Bit’s inks and Santiago Arcas’ colors should accompany Cafu’s lines at all times.

Most Daily Planet stories revolve around Lois and Jimmy, the paper’s point men.  But Neil Kleid shows that they’re continuing a journalistic spirit begun by their boss.  Perry White’s boyhood tale of a run-in with Wildcat and the Guardian not only pays tribute to DC’s Golden Age stories, but speaks sentimentally to the bonds between fathers and sons.  Dean Haspiel gives a great retro look to the script that’s appropriate and lively, but also respects the emotional scenes.

In a strange twist, Abhay Khosla and Andy MacDonald’s Jimmy Olsen feature ends up the moodiest story in the issue, sort of discussing the philosophical implications of Jimmy’s multitude of wacky adventures.  It’s narrated and drawn well, and even has some good moments of humor, but lacks grounding.  It feels very Twilight Zone—you sense there’s an important point being made, but the execution is so weird you just wonder how it’s intended to affect or say something about the character.

I have nothing to say about the Bizarro story except it makes little sense—which is fitting, I suppose.  Dan McDaid’s cartoony art is perfect for fun Bizarro hijinks (though the yellowish cast over everything gets nauseating after a while), but Steve Horton doesn’t really offer much in the way of a coherent script, much less one with appreciable humor.

Joe Caramagna gets the right voice for Supergirl—curious, a bit self-conflicted, but hopeful—but it can’t be said he gives her appealing characters to bounce off of.  They seem like they’re just thrown in to give her people to talk to and some easy conflicts.  Sure, there are some clueless guys out there, but these dudes take the cake (“‘Karalinda.’  Asian, huh?”  Seriously?  She’s totally white and blonde!).  Trevor McCarthy draws it fantastically though—his lines are kinetic and youthful, though colored a bit too darkly by Andre Szymanowicz.