By: Joe Casey (writer), Mike Huddleston (art & colors), Rus Wooton (letters), Sonia Harris (graphic design)
The Story: Butcher Baker in the clutches of Jihad Jones. Oh my!
The Review: This continues to be the book that it was when it launched: A comic unafraid to show just about any kind of story with wonderful art and design.
To date, most of the “Wow! I can’t believe they really showed me that” moments were sexual as Casey and Huddleston were very consciously pushing the action into very R-rated territory. This issue ramps up some violence that we haven’t really seen before as the protagonist of the series (Butcher Baker) has been captured by his nemesis, Jihad Jones, and the bad guy puts a fierce beating on the hero. Love what Huddleston does with the art in this sequence as he is switching styles from panel to panel. When we see Jones, he is tightly drawn and colored in this 60’s/70’s palate of lime green, burnt orange and pink (i.e. summer of love colors), but when we cut to BB getting brutally beaten with tire-irons, the linework becomes starkly rougher and more expressionistic with the coloring being black/white and RED. In these scenes you’ve all kinds of neat art stuff going on: there are smeared ink blobs on the page to signify blood and Jones’s henchmen look like their interior shading could have been done with Huddleston’s fingers it is so chunky.
Once again, this is an artistically wonderful book.
There are also some really cool design elements to the issue, including a flashback where someone (I presume Oback) has made Huddleston’s art to appear like it came out of an old comic book. It’s a neat effect. I’ve never gotten a good answer from anyone as to what a person credited with “design” is precisely doing, but I do know that almost any comic that credits a designer (Marineman, Elephantmen, Bulletproof Coffin, Infinite Vacation, etc.) has a visual look that is very impressive and polished.
From a story standpoint, not a whole lot dramatic going on in this issue. Casey is clearly telling some grand story of an over-the-hill hero (like the Comedian in Watchmen) and it’s always feels a little trite to review the “story” in each individual installment of a larger story. But they publish the material this way, so I have to report that nothing too fundamental happens in this issue. There are some very funny moments that arise from the Jay Leno/Dick Cheney duo as Dick is trying to run a serious meeting to discuss the “threat” posed by BB while Jay keeps diverting the meeting by telling Tonight Show monolog jokes.
Conclusion: Visually very appealing, but not a whole lot going on in this issue. However, this is in no danger of being dropped from my pull list.
Grade: B-
-Dean Stell
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