Letter 44 #4 – Review

By: Charles Soule (story), Alberto Jiménez Alburquerque (art), Dan Jackson (colors)

The Story: Stephen makes the worst hiring decision of his presidency.

The Review: It must take a certain kind of genius to write a mystery.  After all, you’ve got to be smarter than your audience if you want to keep them baffled as to where the story is going.  This is a tall order, no doubt, perhaps too tall for a writer who is simultaneously trying to grasp the intricacies of political intrigue and sci-fi phenomena.  As intelligent and ambitious as Soule is, I’m not sure he can really deliver a conspiracy of this level—at least, not in a comic.

Comics tend to move fast, especially in monthly issues.  You’re talking about twenty to thirty pages, which in prose might offer a lot of substantial development, but which is all too easily devoured as a series of static visuals.  But few readers, or writers, for that matter, are willing to endure several months of issues just to get through the beginning of a storyline.  This might explain why, four issues in, we already have the first assassination of the Blades administration.