blogging by Andrew Wickliffe
Eh. Ennis doesn’t have a good finish for the arc. He goes for the funny finish with a joke about something not particularly amusing. He hasn’t really established the Shadow making jokes along those lines–I think he did mention a foul sense of humor at one point, but it wasn’t enough. The end flops. It’s […]
MoreEnnis brings the Shadow in–he didn’t show up last issue–and it doesn’t work out. The issue works, for the first half, because it’s the wartime intrigue book. The Japanese villains have their machinations and Cranston and Margo have some stuff going on too. Then Cranston gets into costume and it all goes to pot. Well, […]
MoreI don’t think Ennis has a good handle on Margo and Cranston’s relationship. He’s trying to figure it out in the story, which is fine, but it’s a minor subplot and it ought to be more. He keeps insinuating things, but never clarifies. It’s a bewildering approach. Or it would be if he weren’t doing […]
MoreI wonder if Ennis is going out of his way to demonize the main villains–he ends on with reminder of their atrociousness–as a way to curb the Japanese being the main villains of the story. When it comes to World War II, the Germans get the most emphasis from Western storytellers. Ennis avoids that route. […]
MoreEnnis plays The Shadow like a really tough Indiana Jones picture. Indiana Jones with some magic and the bad guys are worse. They’re not just villains because they’re Japanese, they’re also villains because they do really bad things. While the issue’s entertaining–and it’s nice to see Ennis give Margo Lane some personality–he hasn’t introduced any […]
MoreI’m having a hard time describing Garth Ennis’s take on The Shadow. There’s some magic to it, which makes the Dynamite rendition different from the others I’ve read or seen. But the magic just makes the character more cold; he’s not so much vicious or aloof, rather calculatedly cold. It probably makes the character more […]
MoreIn the notes for this issue, Moore and Reppion discuss the novel’s sexism. I think the less guarded description would be Stoker’s misogyny. It’s somewhat curbed here, in the adaptation, as the writers are aware of its presence, whereas Stoker would not have been. Lots happens in the issue and I could only wonder how […]
MoreUnfortunately, Worley’s gone this issue (he’s credited with layouts). Verma is … Verma’s painted comic art looks like all the lame painted comic art I’ve seen before, the stuff to make me dread a painted comic. His figures are fine, his faces are awful. The texture and depth of the book is now gone. It’s […]
MoreSo, I guess I hadn’t realized how important Aaron Campbell’s layout contributions are to this series. There’s an example in the back of the comic and it’s clear he’s significant. The Dracula novel, with the diary entries, the letters, the clippings, is sort of a multimedia (for the late nineteenth century) piece, and this adaptation […]
MoreNo one told me Dracula was going to be a digitally painted comic. I usually avoid those. But I probably still would have picked this one and a good thing, because it’s not bad. As a novel, Dracula, is complete garbage. It’s such garbage, it’s almost impossible to find a good adaptation of it, illustrated, […]
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