By: Stephen Scott (writer), David Hahn (art), Guillem Mari (colors)
The Story: An assassin lady who dresses up in disguise to kill her targets.
What’s Good: Not much. There are a million silly, funny quips I could make, but that would be rude with a creator-owned book title like this one. So let’s focus on the art, which is the best part of this comic.
The art reminds me a little bit of Oeming’s art in Powers. It isn’t as good as Oeming’s and it isn’t quite the same, but it has that similar “Did you draw this with a Sharpie?” look to it that I enjoy. Given that I might scream if I see another gritty/assassin book that is all photo-realistic, it was nice to see pretty good art on a story like this even if it did fail a little during the action scenes.
What’s Not So Good: The story is big-time confusing. I have a standing personal rule that I don’t read message board comments before I review a comic here at WCBR so that what the reader is getting is my unpolluted opinion and not some group-think review. And the only time I break that rule is when I read a comic like Murderland that just confused the hell out of me and I think there’s a chance that I just didn’t get it or read it properly. So, I can say with confidence that this is a confusing comic…there’s not trick to it. It might get better in future issues, but it didn’t work for me here.
The story centers around an assassin-ess named Method. She plays herself up as an actress who is just playing her part (the part where she kills people), but the story goes VERY non-linear about half-way through and starts flashing back to what I think was Method before she became an assassin (I really wasn’t sure). Then another assassin shows up (or was he a bodyguard?) to prevent her from killing her target, they fight, her handler/boyfriend is wounded and Method suddenly grows spikes out of her knees and fingers and wins the fight with the assassin/guard, but then runs away without killing her target…. Hopefully telling that as a run-on sentence will approximate what it was like to read. It is a bit of a mess.
The only glimmer of hope I see for the story is the tie-in to arabber, street huxterism and the possibility that what we’ve seen here in issue #1 was all a ruse of sorts, but I just didn’t see enough promise to encourage me much.
Conclusion: WTF? This is why I hate pre-ordering comics, because now I’m stuck with issue #2 whether I want it or not.
Grade: D
– Dean Stell
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