No more Velvet. At least not for now; this arc ends with the end of Velvet’s initial storyline. I really should have known if it was just intended for fifteen issues. I always want that Brubaker ongoing, he always goes twelve to twenty. Or in that range. Enough to make fans out of the book,…

Brubaker just did the Brubaker thing where his narrating protagonist finds something out but the reader can’t know about it so instead the protagonist just talks about how this piece of information is earth-shattering. It might not even be the first time Brubaker’s used this device in Velvet. It just sticks out because it involves…

Epting gets a little loose this issue, but it’s some great action art. The thing about Velvet is how well the creators understand what they’re doing. Brubaker occasionally pushes too far–The Rock Sean Connery thing–but Epting never does. His seventies action is perfect. Brubaker does a talking heads book, mixed with some stylized action and…

Steve Epting is an action artist. It’s what he does, it’s what makes him special. He’s able to do fantastic comic book action, where he makes the reasonable fantastical and the fantastical reasonable. It’s a perfect thing for Velvet, which is a glossy spy thriller set in the seventies after all. The comic’s setting isn’t…

It’s my favorite issue of Velvet in a long time and I’m not entirely sure why. It might just be because Epting drawing an American secret agent with grey temples with a bouffant-ish hair cut reminds me of seventies Marvel black and white Gene Colan. It just feels right. But the rest of the issue…

It’s a bridging issue. But, since it’s Brubaker, he feels the need to do it to bridge his arcs together. To give that trade paperback an extended cliffhanger, not just each issue in the trade. It lacks texture, it lacks tone. Brubaker actually does have this significant new character (Sean Connery) running around Velvet, but…

It’s a decent, not great, issue of Velvet. Brubaker’s resolution to his rip-off of The Rock works out a whole lot better than I would have expected; he and Epting do a nice talking heads comic with the Sean Connery (sorry, Patrick Stewart more like) telling Velvet just enough of what she thinks she knows.…

I guess Brubaker has seen The Rock. Maybe he’s hoping no one else remembers it…. It’s a bridging issue, which I suppose is to be expected–it is midway through an arc after all–but the places where one would expect Brubaker to excel, he fumbles. He wraps a flashback into the narrative and switches perspective to…

Leave it to Brubaker–my favorite issue of Velvet so far and she isn't even in her own comic. Instead, it's Brubaker chronicling the efforts of two guys working for the agency (and neither seem to be the corrupt faction out for Velvet) trying to find her. There's really good narration from the first guy, Colt,…

Brubaker starts Velvet’s second arc and it’s just as clear as with the first one, there’s something just a little off about it. Epting doesn’t get much opportunity for the period piece stuff this issue either, which is too bad. There’s a whole bunch of exposition with Velvet explaining her thinking about her investigation–it brings…

Maybe half the issue is really good background stuff with Velvet’s training after World War II and her mentor. Brubaker’s hostile to the new reader–and even to the regular reader with the bad memory–he doesn’t establish the story in context, he just starts out with his alternating flashbacks. The training and the mentor is the…

Strange thing about this issue… I think Brubaker’s started worrying about whether or not Velvet is likable. He makes her sympathetic right off with her recap of the aftermath of the previous issue’s soft cliffhanger. She recounts having sympathy herself for the abused Russian wife. More than that detail, her narration is very explanatory. There’s…

I wanted this issue to be better. It’s decent, but Brubaker is moving things along quickly. He’s changing the narrative structure up, which is a little confusing, and Epting doesn’t really have any indicators to make it a seventies setting. I forgot it didn’t take place in the present until a line about Soviet Russia.…

I like this issue a lot more; I couldn’t figure out for a while, then I realized… it’s basically a lengthy Steve Epting action sequence. Velvet escapes, runs, escapes again. Brubaker juxtaposes her story against some guys at her agency talking about her. It’s great, fast but filling. The only parts giving me pause are…

If I have to talk about Velvet in terms of good and bad, I don’t think I’ll enjoy the conversation very much. In this first issue, Ed Brubaker brings in one of his familiar tropes–the person with the secret, extraordinary past; one problem with writing a lot of comics, your standards become very, very obvious.…