The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1242: The Darkness #2, January 1997

I'll admit, I kind of started to come around to Jackie (The Darkness) Estacado in today's issue. He sort of reads like Han Solo, but magical.

The thing that really stood out for me in today's issue is the way that Estacado rejects the cult that has spent their entire existence waiting for his coming of age. It's a nice touch, in that Jackie could well have accepted them and had at his disposal whatever means the cult has. But with his rejection, there's an almost comedic aspect to the reaction of the cult's leader. He's flabbergasted that Jackie doesn't want anything to do with him.

Or course, then the Darkness is unleashed, and the cultists are cut down to a more manageable number.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1241: The Darkness #1, December 1996

When I read the Fathom collection a while back, I noted that I'm not a huge fan of the Top Cow aesthetic. Art's a very subjective experience. I sometimes wonder, when I read a comic in which I don't enjoy the art work whether I'd be enjoying it more in a different style. Regardless of the quality of the story itself, would that different art style somehow make me more receptive to the comic? I'm inclined to think yes, it certainly would. And that, to me, when I really think about it, is strange. But then, this is the magic of comics. There's a wonderful example of this in one of Alan Moore's issues of Supreme, in which a back up feature in the comic is a different version of one of the stories in the comic. The difference is quite fantastic, and I certainly have a preference. What is the sense that is satisfied by these differences in art? The sense of the aesthetic, I guess.

So, yes, art is subjective, but it's also art. What I try to do when I come across a comic with an aesthetic I don't enjoy is to try to see what it is doing well within it's own aesthetic. How is today's comic enhancing or demonstrating the Top Cow aesthetic? Well, it demonstrates it very well. Everyone's very good looking, the art is insanely detailed, and there's spooky mystical fantasy stuff going on.

That aside, though, I'm not sold on the character. I've always had an aversion to stories of organized crime. They're simply not my cup of tea. So I'm hoping that as I explore this series (I've got a sustained run that I'll be reading some time soon) it'll become more about this strange power and less about being a hitman. More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 847: Inferno: Hellbound #0, 2001

While the "journalism" that graced the pages of Wizard magazine back in the day was not always of the most rigorous or disinterested sort, the magazine did have a number of features I quite liked. One of the primary ones was their insertion of exclusive comics into the polybags that held their publication. These exclusives, very often "zero" issues, served to both introduce characters and ideas to a wider readership and also to fill in some gaps in particular stories. For the most part they straddled this line quite nicely.

Today's issue, for instance, came out slightly before yesterday's comic, but tells a story set after the events of issue #1. We see the newly-recruited convicts making their way through the portal to Hell, and what happens to one of those unfortunates once he steps through. Though in the main series we haven't even reached that point yet, showing it in this free giveaway comic is a nice way of enticing people to read the coming series, and also inserts a portion of the tale that might not be completely relevant to the main plot, but gives us a wider glimpse of the world that is being established.

The series was apparently also envisioned as a film (you can read an enthusiastic review of the script here), though given the resume of the screenwriters (both of whom worked on the apparently terrible God's Not Dead series), perhaps it's best that it came out in comic form from people who know how that medium works. And given that there's no trace of the film on IMDB, I think that the 3.5 issues that are extant are all we're likely to see of the story. A pity, as I think it has a lot of potential to be a fun action story (or flick).

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 846: Inferno: Hellbound #1, January 2002

This will be the first of five times I'm going to read this comic over the course of the project. Top Cow is one of those imprints/publishers that really loves doing multiple covers, and Inferno #1 gets six of them. I don't have cover A, but I've got the rest, and I count them as separate comics within the collection. And, honestly, it's interesting enough that I don't mind reading it repeatedly.

I'm not sure if this comic ties in to the larger Top Cow shared universe (which includes such titles as Witchblade and The Darkness), as there's not nods to other comics (as far as I can tell) or guest cameos by characters from the more popular titles. The aesthetic definitely fits with the rest of the universe, but that has more to do with the artists involved than with the narrative itself. Apparently the comic is based on a screenplay which seems to have been picked up by a production studio, and the little information I can find about the comic claims it was cancelled due to legal issues. Perhaps the original writers realized they could make more money on the property as a film than as a comic. Unfortunate, as I'm actually quite intrigued by the range of characters that have been introduced thus far.

One thing I'll give the comic is it recognizes the literary history of Inferno. By the issue's end, when the main characters of the story come more clearly into focus, we see that they are called Dante and Beatrice. Where Virgil leads Dante through the levels of Hell, Beatrice takes over and leads him through Purgatory and Heaven. Perhaps, then, in having the Beatrice character approach the criminal Dante, we're seeing a potential path of redemption for a character who, according to the comic, can travel into Hell only because he is already "destined to" be there.

There were only 2 more issues of the series, and I don't have them, though I'm considering picking them up, just to see where the story was heading. And, as far as I know, it's never been finished, in comics or in any other medium. Ah well.

To be continued.