By: Jason Aaron (writer), R.M. Guera (artist), Giulia Brusco (colors), Mark Doyle (associate editor) & Will Dennis (editor)
The Story: The final explosion of violence on the Praire Rose reservation is starting to build.
What’s Good: Scalped is a really hard comic to review in single issues when Jason Aaron is writing one of his normal story arcs because you could sum the entire issue up by saying “the tension builds.” Because truly, that is the whole point of the issue. This is the second issue of the story arc and it by the end of it, he has moved all of his game pieces into place, allegiances have formed and now things will begin to spiral towards a gritty and bloody conclusion. If you’ve read Scalped since the beginning, there is NO consideration of hopping off now because you must see what happens in the end. It would be like someone watching the entirety of the Sopranos TV series and then turning the TV off with 15 minutes to go in the finale. And, much like the Sopranos, we simply don’t know what will happen. Who will die from among these characters: Dash, Red Crow, Shunka, Falls Down, Catcher, Agent Nitz, Sheriff Karnow, etc.
Probably the most compelling thing about this final arc of the Scalped story is the redemption of Red Crow. We could be headed for an ending where Red Crow is on the side of righteousness and the supposed good guys at the FBI have been so corrupted that it is impossible to root for them. Agent Nitz is so repugnant! Perhaps that is what Aaron was foreshadowing in issue #50 when he showed that frontier scalp-hunter who was later scalped himself. At the time, I took that issue to mean that the white man reaps what he sows by neglecting the reservation, but maybe it also means that you become what you hunt or live amongst.
Oh, and big time finale in this issue! I won’t spoil it, but it surely looks big. Although the cynic in me wonders how the suggested big event could happen in issue #52 when the series is ending at issue #60.
Guera and Brusco have really nailed the gritty vibe of this series. Their art passes the ultimate test of being non-interchangeable with others. Think of some quality artists out there and ask yourself if Scalped would be the same if they had done the art. There are a few who would have done it well (Jock), but quite a few artists who I love may not have been able to pull this off.
What’s Not As Good: Not much. I could nit-pick the final scene a little bit. There is a run up to that final sequence taking place in the bottom third of the preceding pages. I know that the thought was to see that sequence and wonder “who is that loading a gun and who are they going to shoot” since you only see their hands and clothing, before that action becomes clear in the explosive final pages. But, for that scene to really work, it probably needed to run parallel to the main action. So, when the main action jumps from a Red Crow scene to a Dash scene, it is hard to properly focus on the guy loading his gun. I imagine that the Red Crow/Dash shift was so that the reader didn’t know who the assassin was gunning for, but it was more confusing that tension building. And, there was also an odd issue with that scene around the mechanic of the page turn, so that on one page you get to see two of those foreboding bottom third panels and can tell they go together, but you may not immediately connect them with the first scene on the prior page. It would have worked better to have the first two pages of the sequence on facing pages and the third image on the following page once the reader know what he/she was looking at.
None of that is really meant to be a criticism…It’s more of an appreciation of how hard it is to pull off things in a comic medium when you have to consider things like page turns.
Conclusion: Although there is a small part of me that wants to fast-forward to the end and just learn who dies, the journey is a lot of fun because the tension in Scalped is becoming tangible.
Grade: B+
– Dean Stell
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