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A review by auriaurica
Victor Lavalle's Destroyer, Volume 1 by Victor LaValle
2.0
It's hard to find the horror comics I typically want to read. The horror is often secondary to drama, scifi, or action. When I find books like this listed with the work of horror icons like Kazuo Umezu, Junji Ito, or Joe Hill, I'm pretty confused. This isn't at all scary, but it is influenced by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I thought the action resulted in muddying the messages of the book and impacted the theming negatively, but it was fine overall.
LaValle's dialogue is mostly fun to read, but it does meander in a couple issues where I found myself reading pages of a conversation and finally asking myself "So?" The setup actually sounds pretty interesting: "When the last descendant of the Frankenstein family loses her only son to a police shooting, she turns to science for her own justice… putting her on a crash course with her family's original monster and his quest to eliminate humanity." Unfortunately, apart from the foundation, the plot didn't really engage me. A Black woman loses her son to a police shooting and brings him back like Frankenstein's monster. That sounds like it could really go places, but he just ends up fighting the original monster and a robot and... I just didn't care about anything that happened when the history of the characters was revealed (I read the comic without knowing anything about it initially). There was a moment where I got a "not all cops" vibe from LaValle, and I didn't care for that, either... but then he gets the cop ripped in half a few pages later, so I'm not sure what to think. Nothing really revelatory from the story, despite it showing lots of potential.
I really liked Dan Mora's character designs for the mother and son. That Bride of Frankenstein look is inspired. Unfortunately, Dan Mora doesn't do the interior art itself.
Smith's art is largely good enough at its core, but his paneling had me confused several times at what was happening. Nothing really interesting to add about this. Lafuente's coloring is actually really cool for a number of the nanomachine effects and elevated action scenes that I otherwise found to be pretty static.
It was an okay comic—hardly a horror comic beyond its 19th century influences.
LaValle's dialogue is mostly fun to read, but it does meander in a couple issues where I found myself reading pages of a conversation and finally asking myself "So?" The setup actually sounds pretty interesting: "When the last descendant of the Frankenstein family loses her only son to a police shooting, she turns to science for her own justice… putting her on a crash course with her family's original monster and his quest to eliminate humanity." Unfortunately, apart from the foundation, the plot didn't really engage me. A Black woman loses her son to a police shooting and brings him back like Frankenstein's monster. That sounds like it could really go places, but he just ends up fighting the original monster and a robot and... I just didn't care about anything that happened when the history of the characters was revealed (I read the comic without knowing anything about it initially). There was a moment where I got a "not all cops" vibe from LaValle, and I didn't care for that, either... but then he gets the cop ripped in half a few pages later, so I'm not sure what to think. Nothing really revelatory from the story, despite it showing lots of potential.
I really liked Dan Mora's character designs for the mother and son. That Bride of Frankenstein look is inspired. Unfortunately, Dan Mora doesn't do the interior art itself.
Smith's art is largely good enough at its core, but his paneling had me confused several times at what was happening. Nothing really interesting to add about this. Lafuente's coloring is actually really cool for a number of the nanomachine effects and elevated action scenes that I otherwise found to be pretty static.
It was an okay comic—hardly a horror comic beyond its 19th century influences.