Good luck indeed to those who daydream through their first read of Good Luck, collected here in its entirety by BOOM!
What’s the story, morning glory? Good Luck, the five-issue 2021 miniseries, starts off in 1989 when something terrifying happens: two giant Gods of Luck bounce onto earth in the fictional town of Little Kentucky Ohio US, and start throwing their weight around. It’s Good Luck God versus Bad Luck God. Red against yellow. Things happen, people scream and are killed, stuff like that. A government science project has developed a plan: they’ve trained a few candidates to battle the Luck Gods, then they’ve run daily simulations.
Now, THIS is where we really enter the fray: we jump in thirty years later, while Artemis, a Bad Luck candidate joins his crew of Unfortunates, already in progress, searching for a “magic egg” located at the Core of a Nightmare House. It’s like a never-ending video game. Artemis is a mess: perpetually late and disorganized, clumsy and accident-prone. Bad luck to be around. But maybe the Unfortunates will finally finally finally catch a break?
Still with me so far?
For the reader, it’s a plunge into the deeply-mined pond of writer Matthew Erman, accompanied at close proximity by illustrator Stefano Simeone. (Lettering by Mike Fiorentino). Erman writes wonderful scenes that include plenty of action and drama. Antagonism, evil people, and risky environments. The story is like a runaway train, though, so we see flashbacks, face plants, God-level fights, and loads more.
Simeone has a gift for colourful exaggeration, figures that prance and stumble, faces that loom large and dangerous. The colours are vivid and big, the panels are juggling around for page dominance. And this is of course a mixed bag: the reader is frequently disoriented, gasping for air, wondering what is up and what is going down. Panels of twisting body parts in movement, caught in mid-gyration, unidentifiable.
It’s defiant, it’s unreliable, but the relentless pursuit of the Luck Gods is a powerful story if one that requires VERY close observation. It’s science meeting art, a Groundhog Day of perpetual worry; the uneasy truce between pushing the envelope, and the realities of the limits of the reader and the comic medium.
Extras include character sketches and a cover gallery.
BOOM! Good Luck, softcover collected trade: Price not available. 147 pages
Newsdesk