Review: Joe the Barbarian #3
I don't want to discuss Joe the Barbarian #3 in too great detail because it contains a major narrative shift for this book. To that end, I'm going to try to keep my review brief (shattering the standard set by my past performances and possibly the laws of physics). So, here are the high points of my reaction to this comic.
First, this comic continues to impress the hell out of me. The artwork remains beautiful and inspired, zooming effortlessly out from the cramped quarters of dwarven steampunk submarines to vast aquatic structures, giant hairball monsters and towering port cities built block-upon-block like architectural layer cakes without losing detail or a keen cinematic eye for action. Every color in the palette and a few they made up are splashed all over the place and the world consistently feels populated.
Second, again this comic turns up an outcast character with which we all can identify: the human-sized son of a dwarven pirate king. Everyone feels out of place in their own body at one time or another and it tugged right on my heart strings. It made me wonder if this was a character with whom the transgendered might strongly identify, even though there's sort of an inversion of the relationship between individual and society and how they struggle with questions of body and identity in this case: proving himself more skilled than others around him from his first moment on the page, he's nevertheless constantly criticized as an oaf and a buffoon and seen by his family/culture as having the "wrong" body. It made me instantly root for the kid, anyway, being myself someone who grew up and has remained a variety of shapes that never seemed quite right, at times too tall, too skinny or too fat.
Finally, there's a huge narrative twist at the end which I won't at all spoil except to say: thought so! I had wondered if something along the lines of the circumstances suggested in the final pages might be the case, as there's a halfway decent case to be made that it's something of a Morrison calling card. I was a little disappointed at first, to be honest, but with time I've come to appreciate that it raises the stakes, complicates the narrative and adds another tensor pulling at the rest of the story.
Klarion
Posted to Review on 1 April 2010
Other stuff like this: Grant Morrison, Joe the Barbarian
