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Honestly at first I didn’t catch that #3 was drawn by a different artist, but now I saw the name on the cover, it does explain things. The most obvious difference are the outlines; guest(?)artist Christopher Jones uses more varied and bolder outlines, and also more spotted black. I guess I blamed that on the scenes.

Many of said scenes were flashbacks to Hunter’s past, or otherwise connected with it, stuff like that is pretty interesting, in my mind. It’s pretty serious, though, so the issue is less funny than the others.

My favourite moment is definitely Dingo showing that he’s not always as silly as he appears usually.

#4, Karine Charlebois back on the art. The faraway crowds were a bit meh with the random dots, but in turn the closeup was lovely, and over all the art’s again solid work with great expressions.

Time-wise this was pretty linear, only the first four pages taking place five days after the rest. I think having the cliffhanger on page 4 rather than the last page might be slightly unusual, but I don’t read that many comics.

The bad guys were nuts, but after the opening scene of the entire series – starring a criminal costumed as a thylacine – that shouldn’t be a surprise. A bit toeing the line for me, but still more hilarious than ridiculous. I’m very curious how Fang will develop.

No time travel this weekend, I wasn’t feeling so well, and was busy with other stuff. Now I wonder what that was, but, oh, well. A bunch of comics I had on my pull list arrived last week, though.

Gargoyles: Bad Guys #2

Greg Weisman seems to be awfully fond of those random jumps in time to tell a story. Oh, well. In this title isn’t as bad as in the main one, and apart from that I quite like the writing. The last pages definitely make me hope the next issue won’t be late. Or maybe this one wasn’t, and my sense of time is shot.
I think I’m detecting a pattern when it comes to Karine Charlesbois’ problems with backgrounds. The ones constructed with a ruler – modern city views and whatnot – are pretty darn good, but more organic stuff – a heap of trash, a tree that’s not far off – turns into a bunch of scribbles. Or maybe she’s just running out of time sometimes.
Anyway, over all the art is really pretty good. And I love, love, love that the women shown in the scenes towards the end actually have different faces and body shapes.

Gargoyles #8

Still with the way, way, way confusing timejumps. I’m looking forward to the arc being finished so I can re-read it in one go and maybe make sense of it.

The short-term writing I love, for example the juxtaposiotion of page 5 and 6, or the chat in the coffee shop. Getting a bit more insight into Gargoyle’s more or less normal clan life is a very nice touch, too.

I guess I don’t have to mention that I love Constance. XD

Nothing really to complain about art-wise, which means I get to say “YEAH, GREAT!
Looking forward to #9

Return of the Gremlins

A 3 issue miniseries published by Dark Horse Comics.

The somewhat more cartoony art is a nice change of pace. Random observation: Seems like #1 and #2 were only pencilled before colouring, and #3 also inked.

A rather light-hearted story, also a nice change.

The treatment of female characters is somewhat aggravating, though. There’s one who is named, Molly, who is the love interest and trophy for the male main character. Like the three other human women seen in passing, she’s super-thin. The dozen or so men of course have different body shapes.

In the Gremlins the male-to-female ratio seems to be something like 6:1, judging from a splash page showing a lot of them in one go, and while the guys are all equally pudgy, the gals have carricatured hourglass-figures, and one of them was even “look how sexy I am”-posing at the viewer/human main character.

What the fuck, really.

Blade of the Immortal 20

Oh, yay, the arc is over. Or possibly the entire series. It wasn’t bad, and I’m quite happy where it is now, so even if there’ll be more volumes, I probably won’t get them.

What drew me to it first was the apparently pencilled rather than inked art in some places, which vanished long ago, and for some reason the mix – some serious themes, some bloody stupid parody of fight-manga tropes (called attacks, whatnot), high violence in a relatively realistic style of art (well, compared to, say, One Piece) – doesn’t work that well for me.

Gargoyles # 7

So, Macbeth asks the Gargoyles to help him keep the Scone of Stone from being stolen. And other stuff, including relationship(drama).

This being the first issue that will be part of the second trade, it seems like it’s a setup for a new part-arc, trying to draw in new readers. Maybe. At least that’d be one possible reason for the jumble of flashbacks, flashforwards, stories being told, in short, panels with timestamps you needed to sort out, which I found confusing.

Mind, I need to re-read the series, after watching the TV series. Having missed some latter part of the second season, I think there’s a lot that’s going over my head in the comics.

One of the flashbacks did tickle my humour damn well – the third one in this post at scans_daily, which CONTAINS SPOILERS.

Other strong points include some very nice art on facial expressions, and the sheer “WTF?! Yay, funny!” of the last pages (which you can see if you follow the link above, at least as of this writing).

Over all, the art was nice. The “photoshopping pencils to look clean” worked way better than last issue, for one thing. The lineart may have even been a bit too light and thus lack variety for my taste, but that did look better than the very thick and blocky and rough in one of the early issues.

Gargoyles: Bad Guys #1

Again with the non-sequential story, as the above, but not that bad.

There’s some really goofy stuff involving a masked villain with a tasmanian tiger theme, and a nearly-as-goofy superhero, namely Dingo assisted by a nanotech AI serving as armour. They are later press-ganged/persuaded into some team (which was first shown, including them, on page 2; time-confusing, I tell you) by a woman calling herself a hunter.

Thankfully, the artist completely gave away one chance to highlight her arse in that fightscene. I guess the fact I noticed this mainly says something about what reading Marvel comics for a year or so did to my brain.

The art is black and white, with digital greytones, and in my opinion could do with a bit more variety in line-weight and a bit less of randomly switching shape of chins, but it does the job just fine. Nice work on some of the backgrounds, too.