By: Jason Aaron (writer), R.M. Guera (artist), Giulia Brusco (colors), Sal Cipriano (letters), Mark Doyle (associate editor) & Will Dennis (editor)
The Story: The big throw-down between Dash and Shunka is here. Bring it on!
Five things [SPOILER WARNING]:
1. Good lord this is a violent and gritty fight. – Most comic fights are highly stylized like something you’d see in an old Jean Claude Van Damme movie where everything is rippling muscles and beautifully executed roundhouse kicks. This is something else. There is shooting, stabbing, biting, eye gouging, penis kneeing, punching, kicking, choking, and scalping!!!! I mean, this fight goes on for pages and pages and pages. It is BRUTAL. You can really hear the grunts and groans. You can just about smell it. I also really liked how the fight was resolved. It was a good ending that was respectful to all of the characters involved. My only quibble is that I don’t quite understand how the winner of the fight turned the tables with one solid punch after all that back and forth brutality. Was it a liver punch?
2. Shit gets real at the end. – Here’s the big spoiler. At the end, Dash announces himself as FBI and arrests Red Crow. That is kinda the moment that the whole series has been building towards. Finally, after everything, Dash has eyeball proof of Red Crow committing a murder. And, making the scene emotionally difficult is that Red Crow had just saved Dash’s life and has started to see Dash as a son, which is highly ironic given the relationship between Red Crow and Dash’s mother. What should’ve been a “Hell Yeah!” moment leaves you feeling badly for Red Crow.
3. Great moments in the art… – Guera has a really strong issue with the details. After a few issues of just showing us that Dash has a huge band-aid on the side of his face, in this issue, Guera goes to great length to show us the wires holding his mouth shut. That becomes a big deal in the fight with Shunka and also in the climactic scene at the end. And there are lots of other little things, like showing us a framed display of Native American arrowheads a few panels before Shunka picks it up and smashes Dash in the face with it. The art also does a wonderful job of showing pain during the big fight.
4. But, the colors are too dark! – Man, is this a pet peeve of mine. I hate it when fights are so darkly colored that I can’t see what is going on! This was a well-choreographed fight, but there are panels here and there where everything is WAY too dark. I want to see the action and not be confused about how the characters got from one position to another.
5. Festus, Nitz, etc. – Lost in the mayhem of the main event, there was all kinds of forward plot development for all the supporting characters in Scalped. What’s amazing about this is how Aaron wedges this stuff in without it feeling rushed or making the issue feel too busy.
Conclusion: We’d been waiting for this fight for nearly 40 issues now, and it was pretty much what we’ve wanted. Plus, big events in other facets of the story. The only thing holding this issue back was the muddy coloring that stole some of the magic from that fight.
Grade: B+
-Dean Stell
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