In this new miniseries from Image Comics, Stellar City plays host to a bundle of nervous crooks, pockmarked politicians, and exhausted cops. It’s hard-assed and certainly weird, but you know? It works.
Writer Jordan Thomas sets us in the futuristic surroundings of Stellar City, where the sky is an ultramarine blue, and the buildings are festooned with advertising. There are logos and wordmarks everywhere; it’s iconic in more ways than one. It’s coloured in bright flat tones, the primaries in all their bright and strident glory.
Letter Squids, with Daniel Gruitt on design, gives us captions with serif upper and lowercase words, giving the book a retro-60 storybook vibe. This ain’t no disco, this ain’t no party, but there are plenty of party-poopers around. The f-bombs erupt here and there, to no one’s surprise. It’s that kind of story, those types of guttural mutterings.
After a possibly unnecessary six-page intro, we get into the ‘guts’ of it and are introduced to Detective Ovra Sawce, who has been called into investigate a grisly multiple homicide. Shades of Dick Tracy’s villains, Futurama’s cityscapes, and LA Confidential’s underbelly combine here to push our buttons, trigger our reflexes. Is it wild enough, is it tough enough? Oh yeah.
Artist Shaky Kane delivers fistfuls of fury here, with heavy outlines, roughly textured, and eccentric people of all shapes and silhouettes. We sense the antics and influence of the late Jack Kirby in some of the countenances, the people staring back at the reader, the extra-tight close-ups of people screaming.
It’s fun, it’s extreme, and wanders over the yellow centre line into opposing traffic. One side of our brain is amused with the witty banter, and the other side is astonished at the big leaps in concept and imaginative thinking. I think it’s weird and brilliant, and can’t wait to be submit my hemispheres to the next issue!
Image Comics, Weird Work #1, $3.99 for 31 pages of content. Mature readers
Newsdesk