The conclusion of The Blue Wall, issue six of the miniseries, leads this police procedural comic to a confrontation.
Writer John Ridley keeps it terse, keeps it ‘police talk’, with an abbreviation of the chatter. It’s terse, it’s tense. The chase is on for Daniel Ortega, the disenchanted young ex-cop, who has killed someone. And now he’s on the lam. He did it all, and not in a kind way.
Artist Stefano Raffaele (impeccably coloured by Brad Anderson, with judicious letters by Ariana Maher) conjures up the squad room, the booze in the bottle, the bottled-up rage, the draining of the swamp, the flatfoot tramping of the beat. It’s formulaic, in the Law and Order, FBI, Rookie, TV show of the week kind of way, but it works this Blue Wall comic. And it’s a welcome change of pace from the current post-apocalyptic-time-jumping story trend. It’s here, it’s now, it ain’t changing hues for youse.
I like the tension, the visuals being saturated and ambiguous, not artsy and glossy. The fatigue, the frustration, the playing inside the rules, however despised and limiting. It’s thickly coloured within the lines, the backs are up to the wall, and as the rogue ex-cop runs rampant through town, untraceable and anonymous. We are so geared up for this, the final issue. The faces, the expressions, the choices of points of view, the pacing, and the focus… Well done team, well played.
DC Comics, The Blue Wall #6, $3.99 for 27 pages of content.
Newsdesk