By: Richard Starkings (writer & letterer), Axel Medellin (art)
The Story: Hip, Ebony & Trench investigate a Chinese moonbase.
Quick review (with SPOILERS): This was probably the strongest issue of Elephantmen in the last year or so. I DO love this series, but it sometimes suffers from being decompressed and not being a monthly book. As such, you’re always at risk for losing the story.
This issue accomplished a lot. Not only did it plug me right back into the ongoing story, but it started the process of tying together a LOT of story elements from the course of the series. In hindsight, that early story when the virus-infected meteor hit the LA beach (around issue #12, circa 2008) has seemed important. At the time, it was just a fun little story of Hip Flask and Ebony Hide dealing with a biological weapon before it could kill a lot of people. But, over the years, Richard Starkings has kept mentioning that event (always with handy footnotes!) and that has made it linger in the mind: “Why does he keep coming back to THAT event?”
Also, there was the appearance of the Chinese tiger-men somewhere around issue #35 or so (~2011)…. These tiger-men always seemed cool, but it was never expressly explained what they were, where they came from and who had created them.
If this issue is telling the truth, we now have the answers to most of what has happened over the history of the series: It is all the Chinese’s fault! I like this story decision for few reasons. One, the Chinese make a convenient and believable bad-guy. I mean, they’re already “stealing our jobs” and building stealth jets and space capsules (gasp!). An American audience is pre-wired to accept the Chinese as the bad guy. Second, I have to give Starkings credit for actually picking a name for his bad guy. This isn’t any wussying out like Marvel/DC do with made up countries like Markova, Latveria, Wakanda, etc. Given the future, sci-fi setting of Elephantmen, Starkings could have easily made up some “Eastern Asia Republic” and made them the bad-guys. Instead he just flatly said it was China. I admire the balls because you know that somebody is offended.
The art in Elephantmen has been consistently splendid since Axel Medellin became the regular artist a couple years ago. What I love about Medellin is how fully he embraces digital art. Of course, all the coloring these days is done digitally and a lot more artists are starting to ink digitally, but Medellin is one of the few artists who seems to approach his work as a singular digital creation. He isn’t penciling and THEN inking and THEN coloring, its more like he starts with a sense of how the scene will be colored and then constructs his linework to match the needs of the page. I’m sure with his understanding of the final coloring, he knows which lines need to be strong and bold and which can be dainty. The lines almost don’t matter because it’s just “art”.
Conclusion: A great issue of Elephantmen that explains a lot of the action so far in the series.
Grade: A-
– Dean Stell
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