This is the second "edition" of this review, and my sincerest thanks go out to Emperor for informing me of my howling mistake that required a serious edit of the first version. In the unlikely event that anyone is curious about why that should be so, the explanation is in the comments section. My apologies to all, and in particular to Mr Tomlinson & Mr Dyer, who certainly didn't begin their Dredd tale after the inciting incident;
1. "Sinister Dexter: Are You Being Severed? Part 3", writer, Dan Abnett, artists, Anthony Williams & Rob Taylor
I've been far more impressed by this latest Sinister Dexter serial than its predecessor. As I discussed a few weeks ago, there's no ethical confusion on show in the pages of "Are You Being Severed" on the matter of the worth of conscienceless killers, and the introduction of the politics of an election in the city of Downlode promises a strip that contains a touch more varied content than just the business of one gang of future criminals shouting and shooting at another.
But although the moral and thematic content of "Sinister Dexter" is looking up, and it is, the story itself was this week so terribly visually tedious, especially for the reader who knows little of these characters and their complicated backstory, that it was hard to want to read through the strip's five pages. And despite the fact that it's so hopelessly redundant to say that comics are a visual medium, and to note that there's often a temptation to avoid saying so because the point really shouldn't ever require repeating, the art of this week's "Sinister Dexter" was shockingly, shockingly, dull. For here we have a five page chapter composed of little but talking heads delivering prosaic plot points one after another, and nothing has been done by writer or artists to make the visuals of this process either enlightening as regards the meaning of the script or entertaining as regards the pleasure of the reader. The script seems to offer nothing that might help make these panels anything other than still and data-heavy. The art is as humdrum and lacking in informing detail as it is deficient in movement, in characters simply doing something more interesting than merely talking or watching others talk.
I would have imagined that if a story had been written which was to be told largely through such unengaging visuals, somebody in the editorial chain-of-command would have suggested a touch of a re-write. Mr Abnett has, after all, an entire future world to place his cast into and yet he gives us, for much of this chapter, two of them sitting on a sofa involved in nothing more eye-catching than eating popcorn while another few cast members are presented on TV. And there's nothing that's signed up in these pages, beyond two panels with flying cars in them, that carries any sense of character or place, or time or atmosphere, that might enliven the process of reading all these pages of chat.
And so, this week's Sinister Dexter isn't a comic so much as an illustrated script for a rather dull radio play. It seems inconceivable that such an able writer as Mr Abnett isn't writing for the medium, that he's not thinking of how to make these conversations at least visually interesting if not emotionally enthralling; a panel description of "bloke sits on settee and chats" isn't either of those things, after all. And Mr Williams and Mr Taylor surely had to have been thinking, really thinking, about how to make their art here more than a flat representation of a few conversations. "Boring" just doesn't belong in the pages of a mainstream comic book, and especially not in one depicting a science-fiction future. Even if the world to come is one of drudgery and deep-framed TV's, it's still notably different to ours, and we need to know what that this difference is so it can mean something to us. What is this future like, and what kind of lives do its inhabitants suffer, and what's so interesting about it that we should even be shown it at all? Most of all, what does feel like to live there? For if we're not being given anything of an emotional resonance to associate with in the script where the characters are concerned, and here we're not, then the world that we're being presented with must in itself be designed to fascinate us, or impress us, or depress us, or in some way create the depth of feeling that the story itself doesn't.
Otherwise, this is just a few pages of a few people having a few chats, and it could be set anywhere and anytime since the invention of cheap and affordable television, or, indeed, given the lack of visual information in this week's chapter, radio.
It's not that this chapter of "Are You Being Severed" needed spaceships crashing into sports stadiums. But some movement and depth and ambiance should surely have been designed into this chapter from the very start, for this is, after all, a comic book, and, yes, comics are a visual medium.
2. "Dandridge: Return Of The Chap, Part 2", writer, Alec Worley, artist, Warren Pleece
It's taken me a while to work out why I found this week's "Return Of The Chap" so difficult to enjoy. Warren Pleece's art is, after all, as charming, clear, and effectively designed as always, and Alec Worley's strip is teeming with interesting ideas; a short list of concepts such as ectomorphic possessors, soul cages and tiny girls stored in bottles and fearful of being eaten doesn't begin to exhaust the contents of this script.
But it's often the grammar rather than the story content of a script that neuters a reader's interest, and that's what's happened here. For my inability to enjoy reading "Danbridge" begins with the very first panel of the story. Try as I might, I simply can't get interested in a static, medium shot of a character I know little about who comes accompanied by three crowded word balloons containing almost 80 words. 80 words! There's simply no way that Mr Pleece can choose a single illustration that can sum up and emphasise the central meaning of all those words, because 80 words can't have a single meaning. All Mr Pleece can do is present a general illustration to stand passively behind those crammed word balloons and story titles. And as a inevitable consequence of that scriptwriting choice, the eye simply skirts across that vital opening panel, recognising the regretable presence of yet another illustrated screenplay in this week's pages rather than that of a really interesting comic book.
Panel two is slightly easier to engage with. It has, at least, two passive characters instead of one, although we're shown Dandridge in unengaging profile and Oliver looking down at his feet. But it does still have 70 words filling it, and by that point, the whole momentum of the tale has already been stymied at the very point it began.
And it can't be said that the rest of Dandridge is designed to compensate for that energy-sapping start. The first two pages close without the slightest note of tension having been created, despite or perhaps because of some rather unproductive confusion concerning a great elongated tongue, which all means that the vital business of page-turning is hardly incentivised, while pages three and four end respectively on a door-knob fizzing a touch and then Dandridge wandering calmly through a wall into what appears to be a pantry.
It's as if Mr Worley is so sure that his audience will be interested in what he's doing that's he's not considered that there might be a necessity to compel the reader's attention. This is, after all, a world with so very many options for the consumer where entertainment is concerned, and yet the script for "Dandridge", along with that of "Sinister Dexter" and "Slaine" too, seems almost complacent, seem to be founded on the assumption that the reader will make the effort to engage with a text which in so many ways isn't making an effort to engage with them.
There's a great deal of note and potential in "Dandridge" that might in other circumstances be admirable, but much of it isn't integrated into the fundamental discipline of producing a compelling story in the context of a weekly adventure comic book. And so, why should the reader really care? After all, as with both of the other strips mentioned above, "Dandridge" isn't an emotionally affecting piece, and in the absence of a moving human dimension, a great deal else of craft and content needed to have been loaded into the work in order to compensate for what's basically missing; heart.
Coming next, on Saturday, the concluding part of the piece comparing All-Star Superman to Superman Earth-One, and then, depending upon the arrival of next week's subscription copy of 2000 ad, either that or a blog about the splendid Catman from Gail Simone's Secret Six.
Have a splendid day! Stick together!
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