Panels Without Borders: Seven
What do you get if you take the opening of the Howard Hawks movie The Big Sleep and mix it in with the Patrick McGoohans Village concept from the Prisoner television series.
The answer is the first issue of DESOLATION JONES and I like it very much indeed.
The idea of updating Portmeirion to modern day Los Angeles is terrific. The city is now the new location for the open-air detention centre for retired or renegade spooks and is totally believable as such.
The plot is almost incidental, as the point here in this initial offering is to introduce the main character and his weird world, but if you must know, the McGuffin for Jones to follow is a Nazi pornographic film which has gone missing from its owner who needs it back.
Because the members of this special group cannot go the regular authorities if trouble arises they contact Jones who sorts things out for them: sometimes extremely violently.
The co-creators of this book, Warren Ellis and J.H.Williams III, do a marvellous job here and I will certainly be joining them again as they continue to reveal more of this damaged man and his intriguing world.
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There were pages in MAJESTIC number five that also reminded me of a certain movie. The story has the hero fighting multiple copies of his opponent and it was hard not to recall the visually striking Neo and Agent Smith battle from Matrix Reloaded.
Still that’s not to say that just because it was familiar to me, I didn’t enjoy it, because I did.
I have always liked the Majestic character ever since his introduction, several years ago. Those early issues by Joe Casey and Ed McGuinness had a real sense of the infinite about them. They took the Superman concept and stripped it right back to basics and did it extremely entertainingly.
The present team of Abnett, Lanning, Santacruz and Regla are very respectful of this earlier material and are obviously trying to build intelligently upon that solid foundation.
This issue is the start of a new story arc and a good place to begin reading this comic. The introduction of various threads from the WILDCATS series is well handled and it will please fans of that cancelled comic to see one of their favourite characters back again, if albeit temporarily.
This comic deserves a bigger audience than it currently has and I thoroughly recommend that you check it out.
If you do try this book and find that you are interested in reading the earlier series, it has now been collected in a graphic novel available from DC. I endorse that to your attention as well.
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Just to complete my trilogy of film references, as I was reading the second issue of MNEMOVORE I had a sudden flashback to Richard Dreyfuss raging against Francois Truffaut in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.
Roy Neary is having a compulsion he can’t ignore to come to a place where he has never actually been before for a reason he can’t explain.
“What the hell is going on here?” he demands.
The man must know, even though he is hanging on to his sanity by a thin thread and the answer might just send him over the edge. His need to understand outweighs personal impairment.
That image came to my mind as I read this comic book.
The whole thrust of the story is about monsters who steal peoples memories and I admit to being a little bit lost so far but I do want to know more. I need to understand what’s going on almost as much as the main character does.
I am sure that the writers Hans Rodionoff and Ray Fawkes have copies of Howard Phillips Lovecraft works on their bookshelves at home. The story they have created here reads like a modern updating of one of that great authors classic stories and that’s the best compliment that I can give them.
There is genuine horror here.
The art sustains and reinforces that feeling. Mike Huddleston has a disarmingly simple style but manages to convey all the necessary action and emotion that the script deserves.
With the right director and actress in the main role this book would make an extremely good movie.
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Number one of the RANN- THANAGAR WAR mini series is this weeks offering from the Infinite Crisis stable and it’s all right.
But that all it is.
The art from Ivan Reis and Marc Campos, who are coming off their acclaimed run on Action Comics, is stunning but the story doesn’t match up to the visuals and make no mistake it’s the story that’s the problem here.
There’s a great deal of it and it completely weighs down the action.
Let me put it another way: Stephen King would be proud of the amount of detail that Dave Gibbons has managed to fit in here.
Buy it if you must but don’t say you weren’t warned.
I have been a science fiction, comic book and animation fan for a very long time. I honestly believe that comics are an extremely vital and exciting art form whose true worth is only now beginning to be recognised in the mainstream media and this appreciation can only continue to grow in the future. I regularly write science fiction short stories and send them off to the magazines. So far their response has not exactly allowed me to give up my day job but I plan to keep plugging away at it..
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