Pearl, Cover, Moth & Whisper

Movies usually don’t linger in my consciousness for more than twenty-four hours, but Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is still bouncing around in there.  I worked to the soundtrack today - it’s so catchy, despite not being the kind of music that I normally listen to.  

New comics!

Pearl 5

A nice bounce back after last month's weak showing.  Bendis strings some very nice scenes together - A strong opening sequence with a quirky topic (a classy porn mall), a riveting text piece explaining how Pearl got her tattoos (which was horribly spoiled in the recap on the inside cover), a beautiful photo-manipulation by Michael Gaydos (who I still get confused with Alex Maleev), and a cliffhanger that has be wanting to buy the next issue.  They’ve got my money for another month. Well done, gentlemen.

I live in SF.  I really need to make it up to this view at some point.

Cover 4

So little continues to happen.  Essad beats up Max for four pages.  Max dreams for seven pages. Max talks to Julia for six pages.  Max recovers for seven pages and reads a colleague’s comic for another two.  The plot progress can be summarized by “Essad lets Max go.” Scintillating. (It actually is, with Bendis’ dialogue and Mack’s art.  Let’s look at some.)

I love the two page sequence below.  I’m always in awe of how a talented artist can make a couple of squiggles into an amazing work of art, and Mack illustrates that process beautifully here.

It's just a bunch of curves, and all of a sudden it's hair!  How??

Moth & Whisper 4

Continuing to enjoy the heck out of this series.  I’m not sure what it is that made me pick it up in the first place, or what’s keeping me happy month in and month out.  Niki’s disguise tech is neat, but that’s not it. The art is fine, but not particularly noticeable. The overarching plot is a standard “revenge for killing my parents” boilerplate.  And yet it all works so very well, and I’m having a ton of fun.