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peachani's review
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Confinement, Child death, Cursing, Alcohol, Blood, Death, Gun violence, Violence, Death of parent, and Alcoholism
Moderate: Police brutality, Car accident, Racism, Grief, and Racial slurs
Minor: Infidelity, Injury/Injury detail, Drug abuse, Cultural appropriation, Body horror, Colonisation, and Murder
shri_ace13's review
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
thopolok's review
challenging
dark
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
craicerjack's review
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
kateofmind's review
5.0
Excruciatingly poignant, with some of the best wordless panels I've ever seen.
jgkeely's review
2.0
So, we already have a comic where there isn’t a lot of subtext. Characters tend to say what they mean and do what they say. So I don’t know why Aaron chose to open this next story arc with a long dream sequence where the backstory is reiterated and all of the character conflicts are stated outright by dream figures. Whenever characters are sitting around discussing what has already happened and what it all means, that’s a sign that the author does not have confidence that they are getting their story across. In this case, it’s hardly warranted because, despite all the jump-cuts through time, the story is hardly difficult to keep track of.
Choosing to reveal all that subtext through a dream sequence is even worse, because a dream sequence is already a convenient, artificial way to try to tie things together. It might be alright if the dream sequenced added new subtext, but just using it to review events means it’s not contributing anything new to the plot.
It also plays into the ‘mystic dream vision’ cliché, and we could hardly have a story about Native Americans without hitting that one. I mean, can you even be a Native American if you aren’t magically clairvoyant? As with the other Native tropes in the series, we don’t get any kind of original take on the vision. It plays out about as expected, except it’s less concerned with creating strange, hallucinogenic connections and more concerned with plainly explicating any subtext which had not already been reiterated (and some that had).
Though Aaron refrains from time switching, the prophetic nature of dream visions allows him to once again reference things that the audience already knows about but which the characters have yet to figure out. The problem with this technique is that it relies on there being some unknown outcome for the audience to wonder about. If all that happens is ‘the character finds out something unpleasant happened’, that isn’t building any tension, because nothing specific is dependent on that revelation. Without that tension, all Aaron is doing is providing spoilers to his own story, and it’s already a fairly simple story to begin with, so telling us what is going to happen next hardly helps to create the tense mood that crime stories thrive on.
But after the opening story, we get back into plot development, and I'm happy to say Aaron has stopped trying to be cute. We leave behind the scattered, overlapping, time-jumping structure and get into a simple, straightforward relation of events as they happen. If a story doesn't have fathoms of depth, mixing up the form isn't going to do anything to change that, and there's nothing wrong with an unadorned, transparent structure.
The art gets a lot cleaner, too, though we start switching artists back and forth, which hurts the overall continuity. It's hard enough to remember which secondary bit player of the ensemble cast I'm looking at without the distraction of a completely different style. The physical layout and the focus are still sometimes murky, but less often.
I suspected Aaron's been trying to play off the chief as an Al Swearengen sympathetic villain, a la Deadwood, which was confirmed in an interview I came across. Unfortunately, he isn't able to fill the page with the pure, unstoppable personality required to carry off such a character. The dialogue all tends to run together and we rarely get any surprising emotional moments, which means little depth. So, the chief ends up a pale imitation.
I'm also tired of the plotline where we see how terrible and inhuman the rez is, and one of the characters wants to give up, but then something good happens and they are utterly redeemed and they decide that the rez is good. It's not a terrible little story, but it's happened at least three times now and it's not helping the book buck predictability. Aaron has expressed a desire to show a complete little story in each issue, but he doesn't seem to have enough different stories to actually doing it without getting repetitive.
While I do appreciate that the book is getting on track, I'm just not getting much reward from reading it. Frank Miller did crime better. Garth Ennis did quirky, harsh dialogue better. Every Native novel I have read covered the same rez cliches. I just don't see anything here that I haven't seen before.
It's so hard to write a dark, violent book and take it completely seriously. Both Miller and Ennis kept their tongues in their cheeks, stepping back from the darkness now and then to keep their story from becoming a mirthless trudge through the exact same emotional territory as the last issue. A story which is so joyless, which demands that you take it seriously, and yet has the emotional depth of a crime drama is hard for me to get through without a lot of eye-rolling and laughing.
Looking through the ads in the back just started to depress me. Seeing Y: The Last Man, The Exterminators, Pride, and Fables just made me realize how miserable most comics are. I'm not going to say there aren't great comics and innovative authors out there, I'm just saying I wish I could find them and I'm tired of reading the same damn thing over and over again.
My Suggested Readings in Comics
Choosing to reveal all that subtext through a dream sequence is even worse, because a dream sequence is already a convenient, artificial way to try to tie things together. It might be alright if the dream sequenced added new subtext, but just using it to review events means it’s not contributing anything new to the plot.
It also plays into the ‘mystic dream vision’ cliché, and we could hardly have a story about Native Americans without hitting that one. I mean, can you even be a Native American if you aren’t magically clairvoyant? As with the other Native tropes in the series, we don’t get any kind of original take on the vision. It plays out about as expected, except it’s less concerned with creating strange, hallucinogenic connections and more concerned with plainly explicating any subtext which had not already been reiterated (and some that had).
Though Aaron refrains from time switching, the prophetic nature of dream visions allows him to once again reference things that the audience already knows about but which the characters have yet to figure out. The problem with this technique is that it relies on there being some unknown outcome for the audience to wonder about. If all that happens is ‘the character finds out something unpleasant happened’, that isn’t building any tension, because nothing specific is dependent on that revelation. Without that tension, all Aaron is doing is providing spoilers to his own story, and it’s already a fairly simple story to begin with, so telling us what is going to happen next hardly helps to create the tense mood that crime stories thrive on.
But after the opening story, we get back into plot development, and I'm happy to say Aaron has stopped trying to be cute. We leave behind the scattered, overlapping, time-jumping structure and get into a simple, straightforward relation of events as they happen. If a story doesn't have fathoms of depth, mixing up the form isn't going to do anything to change that, and there's nothing wrong with an unadorned, transparent structure.
The art gets a lot cleaner, too, though we start switching artists back and forth, which hurts the overall continuity. It's hard enough to remember which secondary bit player of the ensemble cast I'm looking at without the distraction of a completely different style. The physical layout and the focus are still sometimes murky, but less often.
I suspected Aaron's been trying to play off the chief as an Al Swearengen sympathetic villain, a la Deadwood, which was confirmed in an interview I came across. Unfortunately, he isn't able to fill the page with the pure, unstoppable personality required to carry off such a character. The dialogue all tends to run together and we rarely get any surprising emotional moments, which means little depth. So, the chief ends up a pale imitation.
I'm also tired of the plotline where we see how terrible and inhuman the rez is, and one of the characters wants to give up, but then something good happens and they are utterly redeemed and they decide that the rez is good. It's not a terrible little story, but it's happened at least three times now and it's not helping the book buck predictability. Aaron has expressed a desire to show a complete little story in each issue, but he doesn't seem to have enough different stories to actually doing it without getting repetitive.
While I do appreciate that the book is getting on track, I'm just not getting much reward from reading it. Frank Miller did crime better. Garth Ennis did quirky, harsh dialogue better. Every Native novel I have read covered the same rez cliches. I just don't see anything here that I haven't seen before.
It's so hard to write a dark, violent book and take it completely seriously. Both Miller and Ennis kept their tongues in their cheeks, stepping back from the darkness now and then to keep their story from becoming a mirthless trudge through the exact same emotional territory as the last issue. A story which is so joyless, which demands that you take it seriously, and yet has the emotional depth of a crime drama is hard for me to get through without a lot of eye-rolling and laughing.
Looking through the ads in the back just started to depress me. Seeing Y: The Last Man, The Exterminators, Pride, and Fables just made me realize how miserable most comics are. I'm not going to say there aren't great comics and innovative authors out there, I'm just saying I wish I could find them and I'm tired of reading the same damn thing over and over again.
My Suggested Readings in Comics
nharkins's review
3.0
The second volume of this series was fantastic, and ends with pretty big plot point, but in this installment nothing much happens aside from the main character being in denial about the pretty big plot point.