Pherone (Hardcover) – Review

By: Viktor Kalvachev (design, art & colors), Patrick Baggatta, Jim Sink & Kalvachev (writers) & Philo Northrup (producer)

The Story: An amnesiac seductress/hit-woman learns the truth about her past.

What’s Good: This is one of those properties where outstanding artistic design makes it work.  And, it is also evidence that many artistic tools can work when they are used by a skillful artist who applies a sense of style to their work.

The overall look and style of the book is B&W with splashes of color here and there.  Sometimes the only thing colored in a panel may be a woman’s red lips and the lipstick mark she has left on the wine glass, in other panels, the entire panel may be hit with a smear of yellow to accentuate a mood that Kalvachev wants to convey.  The point is that it is very effective use of color because he is using color to emphasize and to direct your eyes to the things he wants you to look at in a panel.  I wish more sequential art was colored in this fashion because it shows infinite more care and sensibility than merely painting a woman’s dress orange in every panel and then rendering the hell out of that orange dress to approximate body contours.   That is boring…. this kind of coloring is stunning and eye-grabbing.

In terms of the art style itself, I’m pretty sure that Kalvachev is using a decent amount of reference material because everything in his panels looks so real.  “Photo reference” gets a bad name because people think it implies “tracing”, but it can also simply be used to make sure that the stuff in your comic looks real.  And that realism is important when you’re telling a story like Pherone that is supposedly set in a modern reality.  It helps us sink into the story when the cars, guns, animals and people all look real.  I think with realism, you need to be all-the-way-in if you’re going to try it and Kalvachev excels at that with this work.

FEATURE – Binding Your Comics

Come read our latest feature, “Binding Your Comics“. In it, we’ll discuss how to send your comics in to a bindery service and make hardcovers out of them. The quality and look is amazing. If you’re into Absolute or Omnibus editions, this is a must read!

Read all about it below:

http://weeklycomicbookreview.com/comic-binding/