Katana #4 – Review

By: Ann Nocenti (story), Alex Sanchez (art), Art Thibert (inks), Matt Yackey (colors)

The Story: No use crying over broken swords, Katana.  Don’t try huddling in a heap, either.

The Review: Have you ever read a comic and halfway through thought to yourself, I can write a better issue than this?  Yeah, me too.  It’s an inherently arrogant sort of thought, we can all agree; after all, we are basically throwing down with writers who are actually getting paid to have their work published—not to mention the fact that we just put down our own good money to purchase this product we’re now disparaging.

I don’t want to overstate my own writing abilities here, but I’m pretty sure if I had Katana on my plate, I could at least deliver a coherent, focused plot.  Nocenti, on the other hand, is all over the place.  There’s really very little excuse for that kind of distraction in this case; it’s not as if she’s obliged to tie in the title to any event or story arc going on elsewhere.  Yet these four issues have given us four rather different conflicts which have only the most tangential connection to each other and which Nocenti barely manages to develop before moving on to the next one.