This issue is heavy on the action. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to be heavy on the action, but it definitely ends up that way. Couceiro does a great job toggling between action and talking heads. It’s the way he paces the sequences–somehow he uses the same pace for both talking and action. Works out well.
It’s kind of a bridging issue. Golden reveals a few things, checks in on his subplots, but it’s all just to get the characters to the place they need to be for the next issue. Given many of the characters are traveling, it’d be nice if things were tied to location. Sadly they aren’t.
Still, it’s a good issue. Golden and Couceiro turn in a sturdy comic book, the cliffhanger manages to be inevitable but unexpected. However, it does seem a little like Golden has started to pad out the series’s issues.
B-
CREDITS
Writer, Christopher Golden; penciller, Damian Couceiro; inkers, Couceiro and Emilio Lecce; colorist, Stephen Downer; letterer, Ed Dukeshire; editor, Dafna Pleban; publisher, Boom! Studios.
Golden goes an interesting route with this issue. He takes almost the entire issue to resolve last issue’s cliffhanger–he also explains why the guy who betrays SAMCRO does so in an almost too action-packed flashback. The cliffhanger resolution’s pretty simple….
Golden might have written himself into a corner with this issue’s soft cliffhanger. It might deal with too much continuity from the source television show for a fresh comic reader to pick it up.
It’s a little too soon to tell how Sons of Anarchy, one of the more unlikely licensed comics one can imagine, will pan out, but the first issue suggests it will go well.