Get your Walther PPQ. Mix a vodka martini. Dynamite is launching (again) a James Bond series. After writers such as Ellis and Diggle, Ben Percy joins with artist Rapha Lobosco to take on 007.
Written by Ben Percy
Illustrated by Rapha LoboscoBlack Box Part One – Whiteout The next epic adventure for 007 kicks off in the snowbound French Alps, where Bond finds himself in the crosshairs of an assassin who targets other assassins. This is the first puzzle piece in a larger adrenaline-fueled mystery that will send Bond across the globe to investigate a digital breach that threatens global security.
James Bond of Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The Secret Agent. A cinematic icon of the last fifty years, no matter the actor (The best of course being Brosnan or Dalton and I’ll hear no arguing this). The man has been a steady staple over at Dynamite for the last couple of years with several mini-series and now Ben Percy (Green Arrow) joins with Rapha Lobosco join forces as Bond finds himself pitted against an assassin of assassins. Does this debut issue start an action thriller with a bang or is it a rough slough?
To be honest, it’s a bit of both.
There is a train of thought that translating something from an audio/visual medium to a pure visual medium that you lose some of the impact. That without the actors to add inflection and personality, characters can only come off as a shell. I’m not going to lie, that does feel like a problem here. The plot throughout this issue does come off as very basic. Bond is on a mission in the French Alps out to take out a man responsible for the deaths of three British dignitaries. However, it doesn’t go as planned as he is beaten to the target by a mysterious (and gorgeous, Bond notes because of course) assassin. He gives chase throughout the ski resort (with some nice visuals from Lobosco and colorist Chris O’Halloran), but she gets away. We then cut to later at MI6 where Bond is being debriefed by M as well as given his next assignment involving a massive information hack, with the origin traced to Tokyo. By issue’s end, we learn that two separate assignments may have more to do with each other than originally thought.
Like was discussed, this is a very basic secret agent plot, so it is up to the characterization that Percy/Lobosco bring to our protagonist to do the heavy lifting. With a property that’s lasted so long, different character traits are emphasized more than others. Here, we have a Bond who isn’t particularly proud of the work he does. He describes the kind of detachment one would have to intentionally take the life of another human being as “going numb” and how it is at time necessary to “go numb” in this business or you’ll go mad. But the numb cold doesn’t have Bond just yet, as Percy communicates through inner monologue. If you are a reader of Percy’s other comic, DC’s “Green Arrow”, then you may know that Percy can get a little…vibrant with his dialogue. And by “vibrant” I mean it can clumsily straddle the line of profound and pretentious. However, here Percy is much leaner with the narration, very rarely falling into awkward prose. There are some instances where the narration feels unnecessary, but when it pulls back, it allows the story to flow a lot more naturally and gives the artistic team a real chance to shine.
With that in mind, the real star of this book is the artwork. Rapha Lobosco’s pencils remind me a lot of Jamie McKelvie, the faces in particular. A very clean style, smooth and graceful that is perfectly capable of bringing hard impact when it needs to. Panel flow is kept nice and consistent for the most part, although there is a page or two that could get a little busy and confusing as to which way the text was going. One page during the debriefing with M stands out with that. It’s one of the more text heavy pages of the issue and the page is riddled with different points of focus that it did require me to reread the page to fully comprehend it.
Continued belowWhile the pencils had a couple quirks here and there, Chris O’Halloran’s colors are wonderful. I have said this in reviews before, but there is such a skill in using the color pink to a wide degree of effects and O’Halloran uses it so well. Since pink is often scoffed at for being an unmasculine color (by idiots, obviously), it did make me chuckle to see it used to such a degree in a James Bond comic, a character dripping in toxic masculinity does make me smile. Whether it is depicting contrast with shadows as someone is killed just off-panel, evoking a London sunset, or the hot glitz of nighttime in Tokyo, O’Halloran’s use of pink (along with all the other colors) is so on point. I am really hoping to see the man’s name around more.
While the art is real good I have to re-emphasize something: this issue is very basic Bond. It has all the classic tropes: the chase scene, the femme fatale, the gadgets (a ski pole that turns into a sniper rifle), the glamour of the seedy underworld. You have seen these tropes done before and it provides a not-bad book, but a book that still needs to work to get one’s true attention.
Final Verdict: 6.5- Some real nice artwork doesn’t make up for a very basic and kind of mediocre beginning to a Bond story.
