Five Weapons #5 – Review

By: Jimmie Robinson (story & art), Paul Little (colors)

The Story: Pop quiz at the School of Five Weapons!

The Review: As difficult as it is to find a teenager who’s got his act together, it’s almost as difficult to find fiction about teenagers that’s got its act together.  As the characters meander in that tense gray area between immaturity and responsibility, they often guarantee that the story will go through a rapid shifting of tones, one moment reveling in its own juvenile obnoxiousness, the other striving desperately to be taken seriously.

Such is the case with Five Weapons, which from its very premise seems incapable of stepping away from its childish good humor long enough to tell a story grown-ups can appreciate.  It strikes me as odd to write about an assassin school, but never allow any character to actually die.  This lowers the stakes of the series quite dramatically, making it hard to get invested in any skirmish, since no one is really at risk of a fatality or even lasting injury.

Five Weapons #4 – Review

By: Jimmie Robinson (story & art), Paul Little (colors)

The Story: It turns out even assassins lie about their age sometimes.

The Review: I’m not quite the devoted manga reader now as I once was, but there are still a few I follow with some regularity.  As someone who reviews monthly comics, I find the weekly format of manga an interesting beast.  While I do like getting a complete story more quickly and in even doses every week, I do think the grind of turning around a product in that short amount of time does result in a lot of filler and plot formulas repeated to exhaustion.

I guess what I’m trying to say is we’re all pretty lucky that Five Weapons isn’t a manga.  Even as a monthly mini, the pattern of Enrique challenging a club president and tricking them into defeat has already started staling.  His triumph over Darryl the Arrow is about as ingenious and complex as all his previous victories, which is to say not very.  Given that Darryl obviously picked up and finished the race with a target last issue, we all knew that for Enrique to win, the target couldn’t be real.  Still, kudos to Enrique for tapping into a legitimate weakness from Darryl’s choice of weapon rather than just pulling off a simple switcheroo.

Five Weapons #3 – Review

By: Jimmie Robinson (story & art), Paul Little (colors)

The Story: All of us would be more motivated to race if there was a kiss waiting at the end of it.

The Review: I knew from the start that Five Weapons isn’t really aimed at the adult reader.  With names like Jade the Blade and Joon the Loon, you know that Robinson’s appealing to a more innocent demographic.  Even so, I continued to labor with the idea that this title would fall along the lines of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-type series: upbeat and fun, but with a serious side as well, open to more angst and violence than, say, something from Johnny DC.

This issue forces me to recalibrate that understanding.  Five Weapons sits comfortably between TMNT and Tiny Titans in the maturity spectrum of comics.  It’s not quite as frothy as the works of Art Baltazar and Franco Aureliani, but it doesn’t seem given to moments of sobriety the way TMNT frequently does, either.  In other words, it has just enough narrative complexity to occupy the mature mind, but not enough to challenge it.

Five Weapons #2 – Review

By: Jimmie Robinson (story & art), Paul Little (colors)

The Story: The Staff Club motto: speak softly and carry a big stick—minus the “softly” part.

The Review: I have a pal who’s an aspiring screenwriter/film director/producer.  When you go to his house, he has stacks of DVDs lying around, and all of them are “good movies”: Hitchcock, Scorcese, and Kubrick; French, Italian, and Dutch art films; movies watched by fewer people than those who read my reviews.  You’ll find a lot of stuff about the nature of life, death, the unbearable lightness of being, but you won’t find, say, Princess Bride or Airplane!*

I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t go through those movies endlessly without some kind of break where we watch something just out of fun.  That’s the same sentiment I have about comics, but if anything, the world of comics has even fewer works that operate on a purely fun level.  That’s why titles like Five Weapons are kind of a precious commodity in this market.  Sometimes, it’s nice to read something that embraces silliness with only a wink of irony.