The first issue of “Chin Music” was a visually striking, yet unintelligible mess. What a difference slowing things down a little bit makes, because issue #2 isn’t as hamstrung with a half-a-dozen problems of coherence and unestablished settings. Decompressing things makes for a story that is close to finding some footing, even if it’s not quite there yet.
Written by Steve Niles
Illustrated by Tony HarrisAl Capone is dead. Shot through the skull by Shaws cursed slug, the gangland legend lies dead before Eliot Ness could drag him to court of tax evasion. Shaw’s interference has uprooted history and now Ness wants it set straight. The shot also alerted Shaw’s enemies of his presence in Capone era Chicago, and they are coming for him. They took his skin last time. This time they’ll have his eternal soul.
I feel like it’s actually imperative that I begin this interview with a mini-recap of issue #1. There’s a very good chance that you’re still confused about issue #1 and might have given up on it. Don’t worry, this won’t take long. There’s a guy, Shaw, who has some untold number of mystical powers. At the end of issue #1, he long-range shot infamous Chicago gangster Al Capone in the melon with a magic bullet. Elliot Ness, who was once played by Kevin Costner (who once blew up the Kennedy Assassination with a Magic Bullet theory), is trying to bring Capone down via tax evasion investigation when he suddenly finds his case is now, quite literally, a huge bloody mess. Make sense?
Niles keeps the focus much tighter on this second issue. The first issue literally launched Shaw from the desert to the considerably less arid Chicago with very little explanation, establishment, or clarity. This issue takes place in a couple of rooms, with tight conversations and clear motivations in the fallout of the Capone murder. You know, old fashioned straightforward storytelling. While Ness and his team break down the Capone crime scene, Niles ensures that the severity of the complications of having a dead mob king in the Prohibition Era are quite clear. Those ramifications inform exactly where the story is going now. This not only throws a nice conflict into the investigation, but it pits Ness and Shaw as reluctant partners of necessity.
We also learn a considerable amount more about Shaw, though his moral alignment isn’t clear yet. Right now, he basically feels like a victim of circumstance and can’t figure out why his having killed Al Capone would be considered a bad thing. Whatever dark arts he’s wrapped up in still isn’t entirely clear, which actually feels like a barrier to total enjoyment of the book, when it doesn’t look like it’ll be coming out with regularity. As an aside, I can tell you that we also learn that Shaw’s a generous lover, as we get to see Ness walk in on him giving his lady friend a little “chin music.” It should have been obvious, but keep this one away from the kids, folks.
Tony Harris draws a fine cunnilingus though, as well as most anything else he’s asked to depict. “Chin Music” #2 benefits Harris in its decompression, because it allows his intricate compositions to breathe more. The aforementioned sex scene is artfully composed, despite being very graphic. Occult designs paper the walls of the room and frame the sex, making the encounter both alluring and extremely strange. As the first issue clearly showed, his chosen structure doesn’t lend itself to depicting a lot of rapid-fire plot action. From top to bottom, Harris art is far more enjoyable when he’s, say, composing the controlled-chaos of the hush-hush investigation of the crime scene over the course of a gorgeously appointed page or two, than actually depicting sequential activity.
My god, but that sounds extremely backhanded.
It’s true though – at least it has been with “Chin Music.” On “Ex Machina”, Harris produced a wonderful mix of traditional sequential visual storytelling to get the political intrigue across and big, flashy compositions when the superheroics kicked into gear. On “Chin Music”, every page is composed to be artful and intricate. One cannot deny that it is a spectacle, but it’s also quite clear that they work better as compositions than they do as sequential art. Both ends of the spectrum can work in the loosely agreed upon definition of a “comic book”, but there are a few pages where “Chin Music” #2 would have actually benefitted from going for more of a traditional flow. Actually, it seems that whenever Shaw uses whatever mysticism he’s privy to, there is an opportunity for the reader to be confused. A few pages toward the end of the issue suffer from this, but I can say that issue #2’s batting average is significantly higher than issue #1’s.
“Chin Music” is a rare case where I can’t exactly call it a great comic book through two issues, but I am absolutely ready to see a third. Niles clearly has a lot of fascinating alternate history to work with here and his mystic approach to such a riveting time period is beguiling. Just as beguiling is Harris’ approach to the art, though it remains to be seen if that approach will end up being an optimal one. One of comics’ assumed contracts with the reader is to tell a clear story through sequential art. Though his composition work is absolutely stunning, and his visual signature wholly his own, there are chunks of both issues where this style betrays the storytelling a bit. This makes the prospect of recommending it pretty frustrating, but the promise is certainly there. This might be the encyclopedia entry for a “trade wait”, even if that trade might not arrive until later in 2014.
Final Verdict: 6.2 – Browse
