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Review of Strange Kiss and Dark Blue
"I want a bit of excitement from the medium, a sense of constant novelty and invention. I want the equivalent of a new single by your favourite band every three months. I want Pop Comics, if you like; my favourite writers inventing something brand new every few months, working with artists to create fun and beautiful comics that I'm not afraid to pass on or lose or even stuff in a bin, because I know that if I like it there'll be, as with a single, an album not far down the road, a TPB collection."
It's an admirable goal. The average monthly comic written for people with short attention spans is up to issue hundred-something, making it impossible for the casual readers to pick up and creating a comics culture obsessed with 'jumping-on points' in series. I don't ever want to find myself reading issue 300 of something, because I like endings. Myself and the casual readers would both be well-served by Pop Comics. It's an admirable goal, but what's important is whether Ellis achieved it, and whatever pithy comments I can make along the way. Let's start with Strange Kiss.
Strange Kiss is a twisted horror story about a gun-toting combat magician's investigation of strange incidents involving murder-suicides, creatures from beyond, and a whole lot of lizards. The closest thing I can compare it to is Unknown Armies, which it would make a great scenario for. For those not familiar with it, imagine a crime movie filmed in the Hong Kong slash Tarantino style with Cthulhuesque overtones and conspiratorial weirdness thrown into the mix.
It's fun, but only beautiful in a very personal sense, something probably best kept between Ellis and whatever poor doomed bastard therapist he confides in. Perhaps visually stunning is a better term. Mike Wolfer's artwork, toned by Dan Parsons, conveys the mood near-perfectly, slick and grim and gross, although when the big claws and tentacles show up at the end it's a little disappointing. I want more slime and eldritchness, please.
Horror and comics: Psychological horror can be profound in any medium. It relies on the audience to react to the tension, to wonder what really is going on out there in the woods or in Jack Nicholson's mind. Gross-out horror works well in movies with decent special effects, but no matter how much gore a comic shows, it will lack the immediacy of film. In his introduction Ellis mentions a scene out of the wonderful low-budget film Bad Taste that affected him like thinking up Strange Kiss did, but for me there's no competition. Bad Taste grossed me harder and longer. Comics create a kind of distance in the reader, you can shut your eyes whenever you like and you won't have to hear the sick wet sounds of unnatural things being done to flesh on the screen. Even if you don't pull that safety switch while reading a comic, you know it's there. Personally, I appreciate this, but I'm a big girl's blouse who likes being able to sleep at night.
Strange Kiss was shocking, but only on an intellectual level. My guts were left out of the occasion.
Excitement, check. Novelty and invention, check and check. A success. A carnival ride that might make some people queasy, but not others. An unpretentious Pop Comic that never pretends to be anything else, moves fast and is gone.
Dark Blue is another strange ride. I'd feel bad about spoiling it with this review, if the cover didn't do it already. Story starts with a police station where everything is wrong, where corruption, drug abuse, and violence are rampant. An interesting setup, which lets the characters say some great fucked up tough guy shit. I would have loved to have read an entire series about these characters, but instead we focus down to obsessive Detective Christchurch and his feelings that reality is disintegrating. In true Philip K. Dick via The Matrix fashion, the world turns out to be a fake, but a fake with a killer loose in it. Things get wrapped up a little hastily for my liking and the climax feels rushed. It's worth remembering that Dark Blue was originally published in ten page increments, compared to the regular old 23-odd page issues of Strange Kiss, which explains why I call the latter fast-paced and the former hasty. It's the good and bad sides of the same phenomenon, and something that will reoccur if Ellis or anybody else writes more Pop Comics in this way.
I'm down on the artwork too. Jacen Burrows leaves too many backgrounds empty of detail, without putting enough action in the foreground to make me forget. Too often Christchurch looks stilted when he shouldn't. There's a splash panel of him involving blood and broken glass that's a perfect example; there should be drama in the shot, but there isn't. It's just awkward. And while I'm bitching, somebody forgot what colour his hair should be for about four pages.
I'll call Dark Blue less of a success than Strange Kiss, but still a success. So what if I'm not completely happy? A comic story that takes fuck all time to read, comes relatively cheap, and contains the phrase, "I cracked his head open in an attempt to let out all the mad dog's shit it's full of, sir." Good enough for me, good enough for Pop Comics.
