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Review: Ballistic #2

By | September 12th, 2013
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

The first issue of this miniseries from Black Mask was brightly coloured, hyper-detailed, anarchic and a bit confusing. This second issue is all of those things, even more so, making for another immersive and disquieting experience.

Written by Adam Egypt Mortimer
Illustrated by Darick Robertson

This madcap sci-fi buddy adventure about a wanna-be bank robber and his best-friend Gun, a drug-addicted, foul-mouthed, living gun, marks Darick Robertson’s return to the hard sci-fi worldbuilding of his classic Transmetropolitan mixed with The Boys’ ultra-violence and the lunacy of Happy.

The most remarkable thing about this issue is the introductory passage, which gives us an account of Repo City’s history – starting with our own present day. According to Adam Egypt Mortimer, we’re on the brink of a global economic collapse that will have striking biological consequences, giant spiders being the least of them. Leading us past decades of war, famine and oppression, we get a portrait of Repo City as an astounding new life form, an organic fluke of a city existing atop a sea of garbage. It’s a stunning idea, and while that sense of blended wonder and disgust doesn’t continue as strongly through the rest of the issue, it still makes for a hell of an opening.

As for the plot of the issue, the main problem at hand involves Butch getting drugs for Gun (who, if you’ll remember, is a gun, and a very sad one at that). An encounter at the workshop of dealer/engineer Crustco takes things in an unexpected direction, however, and before long Butch is on the run – again, some more.

The dialogue in this section is a little rough around the edges, with the occasional cringe-worthy line (“All men are cremated equal”) interrupting the flow of the proceedings. That said, the way Mortimer incorporates futuristic slang does add a lot of interest, even if the conversations do take a little longer to puzzle through. Standing in the middle of it all is a tone-perfect faux magazine spread underscoring the celebrity status of crime bosses in this future world, while the woman profiled in said article comes through a character and a half in the following pages.

Since Butch and Gun are actually separated for most of the issue, we don’t get much time to enjoy their buddy-cop dynamic like we did in the first. However, Mortimer makes the most of the suspense engendered by the event that separates them, and there’s a great slow build toward the end of the issue where it’s all up in the air as to whether this odd couple is ever going to be reunited.

I may have understated the impact of Darick Robertson’s art last issue; with an even wider range of subjects to work with in this second chapter, it’s hard not to be amazed by the sheer versatility of it. That introductory passage, for example, features giant spiders, starving people, police brutality, robots, and tornadoes, and yet Robertson gets it all across with equal verve, employing precise fine lines and a great feel for monstrous little details.

Most remarkable of all is how unified each page still manages to look, with Robertson often making clever use of patterned gutter space to emphasize or set apart a moment in the narrative. The pacing is beautifully handled, with each page reading smoothly even as the content of the individual panels astounds and horrifies. And while facial expressions are handled in a slightly eccentric way, with features coming across in a bit too much detail, the emotions play out all the more viscerally for it. Robertson gets a surprising amount of emotion out of Gun in particular, making it hard not to feel for the little guy. Add Diego Rodriguez’s riot of bright colours on top of it all, and we’ve got another beautifully hallucinatory issue on our hands.

Essentially, if the first issue of “Ballistic” had you intrigued, this one definitely will not put you off. It’s still overwhelmingly inventive, bursting with ideas and colour and detail, and it’s still a bit hard to follow. But then, this may be one of those cases where the overall gestalt of a comic is so gobsmacking that it’s easy to overlook the flaws. If you know what you’re signing on for, and are willing to invest that extra bit of effort and really get immersed in the world that Mortimer and Robertson have created, “Ballistic” really does reward.

Final Verdict: 7.9 – Buy


Michelle White

Michelle White is a writer, zinester, and aspiring Montrealer.

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