Blue Estate #10 – Review

By: Viktor Kalvachev & Kosta Yanev (story), Andrew Osborne (script), Kalvachev, Toby Cypress, Nathan Fox, Dave Johnson, Peter Nguyen & Kieran (art) and Kalvachev (art director)

The Story: It’s hard to describe in a single sentence – it’s weird things happening to a bunch of gangsters.

A Few Things:

1.  Art direction is amazing. – Blue Estate breaks the “rules.”  Usually when you see SIX artists credited for a comic, it means the art will be a hot mess.  Why?  With the typical comic, six artists means that Big Name Artist didn’t make his deadlines and the editor brought in a bunch of scrub artists to ship the comic on time.  That is NOT what happens with Blue Estate.  It’s almost like series creator Kalvachev knew it would be hard to get an A-list artist to commit to doing a monthly, creator-owned comic book…. but he figured he could always get several A-listers to draw 2-3 pages a month.  Thus, every month Blue Estate features this eclectic cast of artists, just kinda jamming on a comic.  The effect is great.  It’s almost like an anthology comic (in a way).  I just love the rotating cast of artists because it gives us a chance to see someone like Dave Johnson doing interior pages.  When was the last time Johnson did interior pages?

What keeps it from being a disjointed mess is that Kalvachev (a) surely runs a pretty tight ship from a project management standpoint and (b) knits everything together with the coloring.

2. Story winds around in a fun way. – The story is simply fun.  The essence of the story is: dumb gangsters trying to kill or screw-over each other.  But all the characters are a little too dumb to execute their plans, so they keep ending up in ridiculous situations.  For example, in this issue one character needs to sell a house ASAP to make money (to pay off some gangsters).  The good news is that he has a cash buyer.  The bad news is that he’s been put in charge of also transporting another gangster’s race horse to the race track.  If he doesn’t come up with the money, he’s dead.  If the horse doesn’t get to the track….he’s dead.  So, he goes to get the money and recruits a couple of dreadlocked stoners he meets to drive the horse to the track for him in their VW minibus where they proceed to get the horse STONED.  Surely, next issue he’ll have to explain why the horse was stoned.  What’s wonderful is seeing how many different plot threads are spinning at once.  It’s like watching a guy juggle 10 balls and just when you think it can’t possibly get crazier, he adds a couple more balls to the mix.  It’s insane, but in a good way.