Review: Choker #2
If you didn't pick up Choker #1 last month, you did yourself a great wrong, to be blunt. Ben McCool and Ben Templesmith really knocked it out of the park with the premiere issue; It's bloody, it's gritty, it's all about the dingy landscape its characters inhabit, equal parts sci-fi and horror. And now you've got issue two on the stands. This is when you wrap up all the exposition and start getting your hands even dirtier, right? Well, before you ship off to Shotgun City again, here's some thinking points.
Johnny Jackson was the fallen hero of the first issue. Amid all the grime and corruption, you could really root for his singular shining chance to return to grace. This time around, he rides shotgun with his new partner, who gets a lot of speech bubbles without generating much interest. McCool here seems to be concerned with one-liners or shock statements, but doesn't aim for developing the same engaging characters we saw before. We're told she's "Colder than an Eskimo's Nutsack, and she hangs her ex-husband's baby-makers from her rear-view mirror. She's either be cold or crazy, there's nothing left for the reader to conclude besides the fact that McCool has a scrotal fixation.
Yet if there's one good thing to come out of Johnny's diminished panel presence, it's that Templesmith gets to play around with his dark art more loosely. There's a magic to the pencilwork that is always considerate of its coloration, the lighting, the scenery, especially as the landscape shifts several times throughout the issue. Johnny's mysterious, blackened hand really comes off as a malignant other when it flies off the handle, floating in from the edge of the frame, temporarily removed from the body it lives with.
It's absolutely counter-intuitive, but this return to the world of Choker is oddly prettier in its own malformed way, like the blood-stained grins on the splash page. Even if bio-engineered narcotic trafficking doesn't turn out to be as awesome as it promises, moments like Seaton's erm... burst of excitement are guaranteed to make good on presentation. Recommendation: Read it off the rack.
Rubber Justice
Posted to Horror, Review on 23 March 2010
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