Lemire and Giffen’s “Inferior Five” was announced almost two years ago for DC, hyping a series that promised to offset the usual trappings of the DC Universe with something a little weirder. Now, after the excitement has almost completely died down, the series has slipped out to little affair. Does the series manage to be as excitingly strange as it was promised all that time ago?
Written and illustrated by Jeff Lemire and Keith Giffen
Inked by Michelle Delecki
Colored by HiFi and Jose Villarrubia
Lettered by Rob LeighThe citizens of Dangerfield, Arizona, are beset by strange goings-on after the “Invasion” that rocked the DC Universe, but only five misfit kids seem to notice them. Can they uncover what’s happening before some sinister force collects them all? Find out in this new miniseries!
And in the backup feature with story and art by Jeff Lemire, the Peacemaker is on a top-secret mission from Checkmate and Amanda Waller to find a mysterious weapon before the Russians can.
Like some of Lemire’s early DC work in “Superboy”, “Inferior Five” has a very strange, David Lynch-esque tone that establishes it almost immediately as being different from the pack. Lemire and Giffen present us with a group of outcast kids, all with troubled childhood situations and mysterious circumstances that have led them to move to the broken town of Dangerfield, Arizona. The most prominent of these kids is Justin. His father died years ago, and his mother has chosen to move away from their old house in Metropolis to escape bittersweet memories, much to Justin’s dismay. Cleverly, Lemire and Giffen establish a lot of what is strange with Dangerfield through Justin’s childish moanings, as he complains “The town is falling apart, and it’s hot as crap!”. The context of this makes us brush it off as Justin being a typical teenager, but as the story unfolds and we see more and more of the town, we slowly start to realize how right Justin was in those two statements.
The rest of the cast is mostly interesting, with some notable examples standing out whilst others fall away due to the tricky job of managing a large cast in a debut issue. I love the teenaged-appearing Helen, who speaks with such a mechanical detachment to her friends and about the environment around here, it’s easy to suspect she might be an alien sleeper agent. However, she has a genuine naivety and connection to her friend Lisa that she comes off as much more complex, having the potential to just be a weirdly-detached teen or even just a well-adjusted alien. Her friend Lisa is one of the other more distinguished characters, being the knowledgable yet rebellious lone-wolf of the issue who has a punchy journalistic attitude to helping kids out around town. Others like the slightly older teens at the House Of Wax have interesting conversations relating to the plot but are otherwise forgettable and fall pretty easily into nineties stereotypes.
Giffen is one of the longest working artists in the industry at the moment and for better or worse, it shows in this issue. Giffen has a great sense of draftsmanship yet keeps the structure of most pages pretty tame and locked into the standard comics grid, yet the sense of mundanity that it evokes works well against the weird, eerie nature of the plot. Moving to the pencils themselves, Giffen retains his charmingly stylized and chunky feel that has developed since the early nineties, which works well at rendering the bizarre landmarks of Dangerfield. The credits page is a great example of this that sets the tone for the rest of the book, with Giffen rendering large, dead trees with dolls being hanged from the branches in a delightfully macabre fashion, as the ground is scattered with debris like old cans of drink, and various buckets and boxes. Giffen continues to build on this throughout the issue, showing the town as this dilapidated yet claustrophobic urban environment, with buildings of different materials almost folding in on each other. It’s such a distinct visual look that lends a lot to the unsettling nature of the comic.
Continued belowGiffen’s character work is much more of a mixed bag here, however. There are some great shots here that capture emotions perfectly, like the kid running in terror in the opening pages, or Justin’s slackjawed boredom and dismay at his new situation. The latter is developed well as the issue goes on, with Giffen giving him great moments as he walks around, hands buried in pockets bearing a tilted frown and occasionally cursing blankly to the sky. However, more secondary characters tend to get shafted in this book. Justin’s mom is built up really interesting in Justin’s interior monologue as a widow trying to get on with her life yet in her short screentime she has almost no emotion, and seems to entirely dismiss Justin with her eyes whilst her dialogue suggests otherwise. Giffen does give a kind of middle ground with Helen, who has little visual emotional display and barely twitched her face in different scenes. This, however, feels entirely within character as someone with almost emotionless, mechanical dialogue and makes her distinct in her own right.
HiFi’s colors here are interesting as the palette as a whole wouldn’t look out of place in a Mad Max-esque post-apocalyptic landscape. The skies throughout the issue start off with a sickly yellow that slowly turns to a strong, nuclear orange. This color choice not only suggests an uncomfortable tone but gives a good sense of the passage of time throughout the issue. I also love how the scenes in the cityscape of Dangerfield are often a wide array of messy colors, yet they all seem to fit within the general, muted-pastel palette of the issue. The scene in House Of Wax is a great example of this, with the bright pink of Theresa’s jumper being a big visual motif that contrasts the blues and dull yellows of the scenery around them.
There’s also a short backup story written and drawn by Lemire, focusing on Peacemaker who’s current mission is leading him to Dangerfield. It’s a fun little character study from Lemire, told from the perspective of Amanda Waller and Rick Flag who discuss that while he may have been somewhat psychologically affected by recent events, his resolve towards peace at any costs is what makes him an effective agent. Lemire’s infamous distorted visual style serves well here, as we see Peacemaker as a character who’s willing to do whatever it takes to achieve a supposedly noble goal, with one of the best pages being a splash of the characters face with strips of the Invasion event tearing through his visage like intense PTSD flashes. Villarrubia’s colors give a faded, newsprint feel that works tonally well too, conveying a sense of nostalgia that fits with Peacemaker’s ideals, yet the colors are still faded and grimy showing the difficult morality of the situation.
“Inferior Five” is ultimately a fun experiment in the DC universe that dares to be different to the rest of the lineup, and I’m all for it. Lemire’s character work is strong as always, with a few minor characters, unfortunately, falling between the cracks, and Giffen’s stylized art is great at conveying an unsettling yet somehow fun tone throughout the story. If you’ve been waiting for Lemire to tonally return to his earlier superhero work like “Superboy”, you won’t want to miss this one.
Final Score: 7.3 – A mysterious and delightfully weird debut that has minor slips in quality that keep it from feeling truly great.
