Mind the Gap #17 – Review

By: Jim McCann (story), Rodin Esquejo (art), Jessica Kholinne (colors)

The Story: Elle wakes up from the longest, least refreshing nap in history.

The Review: Talk about hiatuses, Mind the Gap has been on a doozy of one since December, clocking in at almost exactly five months of break time. It got to the point that I nearly feared the title cancelled after so long not seeing it show up on my comic book shop’s shelves. While it may not have the razzle-dazzle appeal of Saga, its stifling suspense and classic whodunit elements give it a special place in my heart, specifically the place that loves a good, old-fashioned conspiracy.

Unlike Saga, however, Mind the Gap‘s return issue doesn’t put any of its hard-earned strengths front and center for anyone who might be new to the series. Only the most intimate fans will recognize the some of the title’s most appealing features from this issue: its psychological deviousness and almost palpable sense of paranoia, such that no one, not even the ones we consider antagonists, feel safe. For the newbies, who haven’t spent months following the drama of Elle’s comatose hauntings, deaths, and resurrections, I’m sure they’re just wondering what all the fuss is about.

Mind the Gap #16 – Review

By: Jim McCann (story), Rodin Esquejo (art), Jessica Kholinne (colors)

The Story: Elle finds companionship, even after death.

The Review: The last few issues of Mind the Gap were fairly breakneck, compared to the stately pace of its early months, and after that final, game-changing cliffhanger, perhaps we needed a couple months to absorb it all.  Well, we got it; it has been almost exactly two months since we saw Elle’s spirit diving into the unknown and her body stolen.  So refreshed, it’s time to evaluate where the game of Elle stands now, who the players are, and what the end prize is going to be.

McCann answers at least one of those questions directly, almost a little too pointedly, with his opening splash of the cast gathered around Elle’s empty casket at her shotgun funeral.  The arrangement of the characters is not lost on Detective Antoinette Wallace: “Two motley assorted groups, friends and other emotional rabble [on one side]…and an oddly cold and guarded family and their associates on the other?”  But these alliances and oppositions are old news to us; it’s the new players that really interest us.

Mind the Gap #15 – Review

By: Jim McCann (story), Rodin Esquejo & Dan McDaid (art), Jessica Kholinne & Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: Elle Peterssen gets a bad case of comic book death.

The Review: When McCann first revealed to us the nature of Elle’s condition, I don’t think we ever appreciated how psychologically devastating it could be for her.  On paper, the idea that you can return from the dead sounds pretty good.  Hey—sign me up!  What we didn’t account for was the unpredictability of this deal.  Imagine knowing that at any second you can die for no reason whatsoever, only to come back and having to experience that fear again and again.

Well, that would be how most of us would experience it, I imagine.  Elle has a different angle on the situation.  It’s not the permanence of death she fears—obviously, since she seems to be pushing for it here.  The issue opens with Elle musing on the Arctic Woolly Bear Moth’s resurrection (so to speak) cycle and how it climaxes in metamorphosis, finally achieving the life it’s always meant to have.  Elle sees her own cycle of death as eroding not only her ability to live freely, but her identity also.

Mind the Gap #14 – Review

By: Jim McCann (story), Rodin Esquejo & Dan McDaid (art), Arif Prianto & Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: Like the Duracell Bunny, Elle keeps on going and going and going and going…

The Review: When this story began with Elle in the Garden, your natural inclination was to believe that someone put her there on purpose.  But now that we’ve found out the true purpose of Jairus is to make her ripe for resurrection, all the creepy psychic powers she’s shown afterward appear to be an exciting bonus.  In that case, we have, as I noted last issue, some new questions about how Elle’s out-of-body abilities will tie into the plan to make her immortal.

While you hope that McCann will reveal a more specific purpose for the Garden in time, right now it serves as the sole means for Elle to resist her mother and grandfather’s plans.  If one thing has been made clear about Elle, she’s headstrong—literally and figuratively.  The way she ended up in this state to begin with was a result of her determination not to let Min and Erik have everything go their way, and she carries that determination to an extreme at the end of the issue.  It may not foil them completely, but it’s enough that she frustrate their masterwork.

Mind the Gap #13 – Review

By: Jim McCann (story), Rodin Esquejo & Dan McDaid (art), Arif Prianto & Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: Elle remembers what happened at the subway, and it is not lawsuit-worthy.

The Review: It all comes down to that fateful, rainy night on a subway platform.  That is, after all, where this story started.  The mystery of exactly what happened to Elle just before she ended up comatose has kept us tantalized for a good long time, and McCann has definitely milked the whole thing for all the intrigue it could spare.  You’re at the point where you feel as though once you know the truth of that incident, you’ll know everything.

But even though Elle finally recounts the whole ordeal with firsthand details, you’re chagrined to discover that the subway accident is not everything—not even close.  While it’s clear that Elle knows much more about what’s happening to her and why than you’ve previously believed, you the fact that her memories are coming in piecemeal and out of order sets a firm cap on how much McCann chooses to reveal before he’s good and ready.

Mind the Gap #10 – Review

By: Jim McCann (story), Rodin Esquejo (art), Arif Prianto, Fahriza Kamaputra, Gloria Caeli (colors)

The Story: In which you finally discover what’s behind Eddie’s wine cabinet.

The Review: While this series hasn’t been as purposely or exasperatingly obscure as, say, Morning Glories, no one can deny that in terms of the story’s direction, we’ve spent a long time feeling around half-blindly in the dark.  The moment that Elle leaped into her first comatose body, we knew that this couldn’t be your typical whodunit, but we couldn’t know whether this development was a product of science-fiction, spiritualism, or magic.

While I can’t say this issue necessarily answers that particular question, it does reveal a great deal of long-withheld information that shows that McCann is finally leading us toward some real answers.  In comparison to the glacial pace of development from the past nine issues, it’s almost alarming how many revelations we get in succession here.  To properly discuss them, I believe a blanket spoiler alert for the whole issue is necessary.  Read on at your own risk.

Mind the Gap #9 – Review

By: Jim McCann (story), Rodin Esquejo & Dan McDaid (art), Arif Prianto (colors)

The Story: Here there be monsters under the bed—or frightened women, whichever one.

The Review: I would’ve been more intrigued by McCann’s announcement that this would be a silent issue had it not been for the fact that Batman and Robin had such an issue last month.  That not only wears down the initial novelty of the thing; now we’re going to instinctively want to hold up the two issues side by side and see how they stack up against each other, even though they’re completely different products.  That’s our competitive nature for you.

Ultimately, Batman and Robin made better use of silence in its story and also had better reason to use it.  In depicting the aftermath of Robin’s death, silence seemed to embody the wordless grief that comes after someone dies, making the lack of text naturally profound.  Here, silence is used merely to heighten suspense—that is, where suspense already exists.  In fact, for the first half of this issue, the lack of dialogue or sound feels more happenstance than purposeful.  The only way to describe the difference is that the story in Batman and Robin needed silence, whereas Mind the Gap didn’t need sound.

Mind the Gap #8 – Review

By: Jim McCann (story), Rodin Esquejo (art), Arif Prianto (colors)

The Story: It’s going to take some marriage counselor to tackle Mr. and Mrs. Peterssen’s issues.

The Review: Image is producing a lot of very fine series these days, and of course Saga’s getting a lot of attention from both the critics and masses, but I have to admit that of all the Image titles, Mind the Gap may be my favorite.  It’s hard to explain why.  Unlike Saga or The Walking Dead, you can’t really pick out an obvious appeal with this series (except for consistently lush, gorgeous art from Esquejo).  Its virtues, like its story, are esoteric in nature.

Reading through this issue, though, I think it’s that very conceptual quality that keeps me attached to the story.  I just have to admire the craft McCann puts into it.  When you really examine Mind the Gap, it functions not unlike a Tom Stoppard play,* where everything takes place on one set, with all the characters coming in and out in various combinations at precision-timed cues to keep the energy of the scene moving even if the setting does not.

Mind the Gap #7 – Review

By: Jim McCann (story), Rodin Esquejo (art), Arif Prianto (colors)

The Story: To be young again—only to die young.  It figures.

The Review: Between the uneven release schedule and generally slow pace of this title, it’s easy to take for granted how much material McCann has actually established so far.  Looking at the roster page for this issue, it surprised me to see how many familiar faces appeared, and how each of them has been given a secure and definite role in the series.  Now that they’re all starting to commingle, the energy of the story quickly kicks into a much higher level altogether.

Take the reappearance of Lonnie Miller, Dane’s deadbeat dad.  Call him a piece of white trash if you want, but if he is, then he’s the kind that gets stuck to the bottom of your shoe and no matter how much ridicule you invite trying to shake him off in public, he latches on.  More likely than not, his persistence is a side-effect of total stupidity—if you have no idea what you’re dealing with, why should you care about the consequences?—but he doesn’t seem intimated by setbacks either, which makes him the ideal unpredictable variable for this increasingly chaotic series.

Mind the Gap #6 – Review

By: Jim McCann (story), Rodin Esquejo (pencils), Arif Prianto & Beny Maulana (colors)

The Story: Wherein we see the death of a girl’s inner child—literally.

The Review: As much as this series has gleefully danced around its mysteries, constantly taunting you with its tagline of “Everyone is a suspect.  No one is innocent!” the story itself has allowed us to make some early conclusions.  After all, we’re not idiots.  Even though McCann, as writer, always reserves the possibility that he will pull out some unlikely twist at the last second, he’s limited (or should be) by the groundwork he’s lain down so far.

I think all of us immediately sensed from the beginning that Elle has been the unlucky subject of some rather exotic experimentation.  Obviously, the details are a bit obscure, but the involvement of so many scientific professionals—not to mention the silver briefcase, the ultimate plot device of any mystery—pretty much tells us that however Elle’s special talents came about, they were more likely introduced than natural.

Mind the Gap #5 – Review

By: Jim McCann (story), Rodin Esquejo & Adrian Alphona (art), Sonia Oback & Beny Maulana (colors)

The Story: When your dad says he’ll always be watching over you, he probably doesn’t mean it this way.

The Review: I don’t consider myself an elitist where comics are concerned.  I’m perfectly happy to indulge in the frequently mindless extravagance and spectacle of superheroes, even when they don’t have much in the way of literary merit.  Sometimes, though, it’s a relief to take a break from the “catch the villain”/“save the world” bit in favor of some real, down-to-earth stories.  The stakes may be smaller, but they have much more weight.

So after a few days of magic-slinging men in trenchcoats and lost kingdoms under the sea, I was very happy to sit down to the grounded drama of a guy trying to escape his roots.  I have to say, the drunk father has become sort of a cliché villain in a lot of stories—the contemporary version of the evil stepmother—but more than abusively inebriated, Dane Miller’s dad is downright malicious.  He actively seeks revenge against his son; he gives no special consideration to his relationship with Dane, so he comes across as particularly easy to hate.

Mind the Gap #4 – Review

By: Jim McCann (story), Rodin Esquejo (art), Sonia Oback & Arif Prianto (colors)

The Story: Who’s afraid of the big, bad wolf?

The Review: I can’t remember the last time a “Whodunnit?” managed to actually surprise me at the end.  I can’t even remember when one successfully kept me in the dark halfway through the story.  Most mysteries wind up being anything but because they make it so obvious who the culprit is early on.  Don’t even bother pulling the “person you least suspect” trick, because folks are so savvy nowadays, that’s the first person they suspect—and they’re usually right.

McCann cleverly turned that trick on its head by making it clear the person you least suspect deserves the status.  With Jo established as a character of confidence, McCann has the freedom to make everyone else as shady as possible, to have every opportunity to mislead and deceive you.  Astonishingly, he’s managed to do what so many mystery writers fail to do: make you suspect everyone.  No matter how hard you try, you can’t really make a snap judgment on anybody; you have dirt on all of them.

Morning Glories #21 – Review

By: Nick Spencer (writer), Joe Eisma (art), Alex Sollazzo (colors), Rodin Esquejo (covers) and Johnny Lowe (letters)

The Story: We meet the big kids who killed _____ a few issues ago.

A few things (with some SPOILERS from a few issues ago): 

1). Zoe who? – It was a bummer a few issues ago when Zoe got killed.  She was the most interesting of the original students and one wondered who would sieze the vacant title of “Character who is fun to watch.”  Obviously we shouldn’t have worried because Spencer is now distracting us with a bright and shiny new character: Irina.  Of the new characters introduced in this issue, she is instantly the most captivating.  She’s semi-hostile, capable and has that awesome jet-black hair that Eisma draws so well.  Hopefully we’ll see a lot more of Irina in the future because she’s pretty interesting.

Mind the Gap #3 – Review

By: Jim McCann (story), Rodin Esquejo & Sonia Oback (art)

The Story: Who says a good musical can’t bring folks closer together?

The Review: I’m sure I mentioned something before about the storytelling triumph of taking something unimportant and making it important, but that really has nothing on the challenge of taking a total mistake and making it important.  With my distracted habits, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve discovered, after a significant amount of labor, that I screwed up some crucial detail or other and had to scan fifty pages to find it or (every now and then) just start over.

Now, the Jane-versus Rosalind Russell mix-up in this case (and we know it’s a genuine authorial mix-up beause McCann admits it in the back matter of the issue) in itself isn’t crucial, at least not where the big picture comes in.  In fact, besides sticklers and showtune lovers, probably no one would’ve noticed the error.  But if you did happen to catch it, it sure would discredit Jo’s love and familiarity for Technicolor musicals.

Morning Glories #20 – Review

By: Nick Spencer (writer), Joe Eisma (artist), Alex Sollazzo (colors), Johnny Lowe (letters) and Rodin Esquejo (cover)

The Story: Miss Daramount and Miss Hodge as kids.

 The Review: 

1. Really does remind me of Lost. – I remember when this series was first being teased several years ago and it was compared to the TV show Lost.  That was a market-savvy comparison to make since Lost was a wildly popular TV show.  Now that we’re 20 issues in, I can see that it is a very good comparison for better and for worse.  Like Lost, there are TONS of little things going on in the background that might be important – or they might not.  For example, was pretty neat to see a young Nurse Nine in this issue acting as a young nurse/executioner in one of the flashbacks.  So, Nurse Nice has always been a grim little bitch.  Cool.  But, you never know when some of these background elements are just background noise designed to make you look.  Some of them are surely like the shark in Lost that had the Dharma Initiative logo tattooed on it’s back.  God, remember that shark?  People were posting screen caps of the damn shark online, analyzing the hell out of why Dharma would tattoo a shark, blah, blah… And the shark was never important at all.

Some of your enjoyment of the series will come down to your attitude and mood.  If you want ALL the pieces to click into place someday, you should probably go somewhere else because I strongly doubt that will happen.  If it is going to piss you off that we never know precisely WHY the father flogged the hell out of a young Georgina Daramount before the opening scene of this issue, then you should go somewhere else.  But, if you kinda enjoy the hunt, looking for clues and trying to piece together which elements are important and which are just background noise… Well, then this series can be fun.

2. But, lacking Lost’s online community. – Now, I do have a little problem with Spencer choosing this Lost-like narrative structure.  Lost had a viewership of 10-17MM people.  The day after the show, everything got ripped apart and analyzed by a very active online community.  I remember USA Today had a wonderful blog where the community could piece together the breadcrumbs and decide what was BS and what was important.  Morning Glories sells about 9K issues per month.  I know this series does well in trade, but those trade readers aren’t real-time and can’t help us solve the mysteries; they are the people who didn’t watch Lost until the DVD set came out.  Part of the reason Lost’s mysteries were so cool was that you could chat about them at work and online the next day.  MG’s audience is just too small to have such a robust sense of community and that saps some of the fun from the narrative structure.

So, if you read this and think you have insights, post it in the comments.  I’m just a reader and reviewer, not an expert on the minute details of the series.  Just don’t be a troll.  🙂

3. Are there any good guys? – Kinda some brutal news about Miss Hodge, huh?  Ever since we first met her, she’s seems like the friendly version of the Daramount/Hodge sisters.  It seemed like she might actually be on the kids’ side (whatever that means).  Well, she pretty much dispelled that notion when she splattered that Vanessa girl all over the place.  Or, is it is case where she just has her own agenda?  Maybe she can be nice to the kids sometimes, or when it serves her needs…

Mind the Gap #2 – Review

By: Jim McCann (story), Rodin Esquejo & Sonia Oback (art)

The Story: No one likes a show-off, not even when you’re in a coma.

The Review: At this early juncture of a mystery, I rarely go for any serious speculation as to the “who” in “whodunit.”  This seems especially important here since we really know very little about our victim at this point other than a theater background and a luxury upbringing.  We still only have a vague sense as to the nature of her relationships.  We can’t even confidently say the personality she displays in the Garden is the same as in the waking world.

Without a firmer grasp on all these things, it’d be quite a stretch to have a culprit, even a theoretical one, in mind since the most important factor is missing: motive.  At the end of the day, that really is the deciding element in why any of a mystery’s conflict happens in the first place.  And that’s not even accounting for completely out-of-the-blue twists, like an elaborate evil scheme for which the victim is just an unlucky pawn—or when the culprit turns out to be gloriously insane in the end, somehow disguising it for ninety-nine percent of the story.

Morning Glories #19 – Review

By: Nick Spencer (writer), Joe Eisma (artist), Rodin Esquejo (cover), Alex Sollazzo (colors), Johnny Lowe (letters)

The Story: The climax of a story cycle as we return to where Zoe and Hunter are during the Woodrun game.

A few things (with SPOILERS): 1). Tense issue! – I’m of two-minds on the tension as Zoe chases Hunter through the forest with a knife.  On one hand, the whole thing came off as very believable.  A kinda pathetic kid like Hunter is usually “safe” in comics unless the writer is exploiting the death of said pathetic character for shock value, but Spencer and (especially) Eisma made me believe that Hunter was in mortal danger.  Well done!  On the other hand, why was Zoe trying to kill Hunter?  One problem I have with MG is the way the story bounces around issue to issue making it tough for a single issues reader.  This issue picks up directly from mid-January’s Morning Glories #15.  My recollection is that Zoe and Hunter were actually getting kinda chummy.  Maybe Zoe wasn’t going to actually hook up with Hunter, but she definitely liked that he was paying attention to her and when Hunter instead moved his attentions to the chubby girl, Zoe wasted no time in killing her; Zoe had to be the center of attention.  So….why is she suddenly trying to kill Hunter?  And why can’t Hunter just take the knife from Zoe?  Even a pathetic guy should be able to disarm a teenage girl with a knife in a heartbeat.

Mind the Gap #1 – Review

By: Jim McCann (story), Rodin Esquejo & Sonia Oback (art)

The Story: One of these people is not like the other…guess who and how?

The Review: The hallmark of a good mystery is not only where you the writer gives you enough material so you can actually try to solve it yourself along the way.  This requires the liberal sprinkling of clues throughout the story, but sort nudged into corners to make it harder for you to put them all together until it’s too late.  You can have the fun of challenging your own Sherlock prowess, and you can enjoy the intricate plotting and forethought of the writer.  It’s win-win.

And it looks like McCann is set to give you just that.  The spark of the mystery is as classic as they come: a woman’s been attacked—on a train (subway), no less—and the big question is, “Whodunit?”  Time is of the essence in figuring it out, as McCann sets a countdown (what my former creative writing professor would call the “ticking clock” device) of sorts for when the attacker will come back to finish what he’s started.

Morning Glories Vol. 1 – Review

Words by Nick Spencer, Art by Joe Eisma, Covers by Rodin Esquejo, Colors by Alex Sollazzo

A friend of mine recently got into Lost and said that if he had watched it week to week, he didn’t think he would have enjoyed it half as much as watching them all at once. It would have been too frustrating and tiresome to keep track week-to-week and then over summer hiatus and dealing with the crappy episodes going “Jack’s tattoos? What the hell?” and having to wait a full seven days hoping the next episode would make up for it. On DVD, he got to Jack’s tattoo episode and said, “eh, that sucked. Next,” and moved on. My point is, I wonder if Morning Glories is similar. Because as a graphic novel, it is probably one of the best things I’ve read in the last year…but if I was forced to just get snippets of the story month to month? I might have killed someone. And by someone, I mean Nick Spencer.

Spencer is the new hotness. We all know that. Marvel signed him to be exclusive faster than the devil signed Faust. Now he’s got an Iron Man series, an Avengers series, and slated to write even more (please be Iron Fist…just saying, he would be awesome on Iron Fist). So when his name exploded on the solicitations like an eager high school boy on prom night, I looked him up. Morning Glories—good reviews all around, and what’s this? The first volume is only $9.99? Oh, Image, I love your marketing scheme! How can you say no to a ten-buck trade? And if it’s good—then of course you’ll have to get the next trade at $14.99. So, I was all set give this new guy a try and see if he was really as good as the mythos had built him up to be.

I read the first trade of Morning Glories three times—twice in one night. I just could not believe that this was a comic that existed. It’s everything I love about Lost, Runaways, and Avengers Academy rolled together. If this came in a tortilla shell, I would never have to go to Chipotle again. The mysteries Spencer set up could easily go on for six seasons—I mean volumes. More even. And, as Lost was smart to do, as compelling as the mysteries are, Spencer focuses on the characters. We have our Jack—though this Jack is a 16-year-old blonde, which is perfectly fine. We also have a Ben—Miss Daramount. She might seem like the most evil bitch in comics now, but at one point Ben was the most evil person in television, but look me in the eye and tell me you didn’t cry just a little for him in the series finale of Lost. I feel like we might get something like that from Daramount. The characters are already so fleshed out that they only thing left to do is develop. Now, hopefully Spencer doesn’t do the one thing Lost did wrong—through wrenches into a character’s story just for the sake of throwing a wrench (Charlie season 2…what the hell was any of that about?).  The only character we don’t know much about yet is Jun—but we need at least one really mysterious character, right? Can’t give us too many nuggets this early on, right?

Morning Glories #3 – Review

by Nick Spencer (writer), Joe Eisma (art), Alex Sollazzo (colors), and Johnny Lowe (letters)

The Story: Casey tries to rescue Jade, who discovers another secret on her way to the nurse’s office.

What’s Good: There’s some really awesomely powerful stuff going on at Morning Glories Academy.  From the first page onward,  Spencer is great enhances the power and scope of the Academy and its secrets.  The menace is, as a result, more palpable and there’s a greater sci-fi/fantasy edge to it all.  Basically, we’re able to get a better handle on the sort of mystery we’re dealing with here, and it’s one that is ancient, powerful, and seems to involve human experimentation (maybe?).  Either way, I’m interested, and thinks get a whole lot bigger and, at time, portentous than last month.

Spencer also gives us some really good dialogue between Casey and Ike.  It’s one of the many unique dynamics between MG’s characters.  The conversation between the two characters also makes Ike into more of a Lex Luthor type figure; he’s an arrogant rogue and an SOB, but he’s always just about ready to be a good guy.  Regardless, his voice is bang-on and a joy to read.

Casey is also positioned quite expertly by Spencer.  On the one hand, it’s clear that Spencer intends her to be the “hero” of the story, and the group.  However, despite this, she’s easy to relate to and root for and she never comes across as bland.  She’s a fully realized character with real emotions and qualities and I find her to be a sympathetic and strong lead character.