Bodies #2 – Review

By: Si Spencer (story), Meghan Hetrick, Dean Ornston, Tula Lotay, Phil Winslade (art), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: Four detectives are better than one.

The Review: I speak from some experience when I say that when you have a lot of people working on the same project, no matter how different they may be from each other, there has to be some common ground for them to stand on or the project fails. In Bodies, the differences between our four detectives are even greater from the spans of time that lies between them, but there has to be some reason why these four were chosen, and the best way to discover it is to see what they have in common.

This issue makes that task easy by calling attention to something the last issue downplayed: each of our detectives live under the pressure of discrimination. Edmond muses how his closeted homosexuality may result in his imprisonment; Charles Whiteman changed his name (Karl Weissman) to escape from anti-Semitic barbs like the one thrown by Sean Mahoney, uncle of the man he interrogated; Shahara can’t freely discuss her Muslim faith with comrade/romantic interest Barber, much less the racist protestors bashing her car.

Bodies #1 – Review

By: Si Spencer (story), Meghan Hetrick, Dean Ornston, Tula Lotay, Phil Winslade (art), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: Murder is the kind of history that tends to repeat itself.

The Review: Done with the Bar, finally—at least for the next few months. And yet, in the world of comics, life goes on as usual. It’s kind of comforting actually, to think that whether I pass or fail, there will always be comics. But enough with sentimentality; let’s talk about Bodies. One of the reasons why I loved Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers was for the narrative craft it took to use seven disparate stories to push each other forward as well as an overarching plot.

Bodies very much lands in the same mold, except you can see more clearly see the cooperation among the four storylines and their featured investigators: D.S. Shahara Hasan of 2014, Inspector Edmond Hillinghead of 1890, Detective Maplewood of 2050, and Inspector Charles Whiteman of 1940. Remarkably enough, Spencer is able to take each era in that order and still render a fairly smooth narrative.

The Unwritten #54 – Review

By: Mike Carey (story), Peter Gross (art), Mark Buckingham (pencils), Dean Ormston (inks), Chris Chuckry (colors)

The Story: And they all died unhappily ever after.

The Review: Hiya, folks—just filling in for Dean while he’s out of the country.  What that, let’s get to it.  Like most crossovers, The Unwritten Fables has offered its share of fun, but is mostly overshadowed by sharp deviations from the ongoing plots in its participating series (Fables seems blithely ignorant that a crossover is going on at all).  Unfortunately, this arc has also fallen into the trap of quarantining its story so that it has no lasting impact beyond the crossover itself.

Unlike some folks, including perhaps Dean himself, I had no problem with at least the notion of a Fables/Unwritten team-up.  The premise itself is sound; Unwritten revolves around the nature of stories, and the Fables have an awareness of their fictional nature and their place in the story-worlds that fits very well in Unwritten’s explorations.  The problem is the plot quickly became less about metafiction and more about a fruitless battle against the embodiment of all evil.