Din's Geek Reviews - Wednesday Shuffle #3

Hello everyone, and welcome to another installment of Wednesday Shuffle, your weekly source for comic-book rundowns.

Well, due to yet another delay in the publishing schedule over at Zenescope Entertainment, Tales From Wonderland: Tweedledum and Tweedledee is still not out. That means that there is only one comic on my list this week, so I’ll take the time to really rake this one over the coals. And that comic is…

Knights of the Old Republic #44 – The Reaping, Pt. 2
A really, really freaking long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…

Plot
Set roughly 3,960 years before the A New Hope, KotOR #44 is the second part of a two-issue story arc regarding the infiltration of a slaver ring by our aspiring young hero, Zayne Carrick, and his rag-tag band of adventurers. This story arc was divided pretty evenly between exposition and action, with this issue taking care of the latter. The supermajority of the comic is one big battle in space interjected with background information shouted between characters as their lives fall in and out of certain peril.

Seriously. Here’s the rundown:

Flashback. Heroes fight robots. Other hero rescues them. They get in their ship. The villains talk about how badass their leader is. The heroes talk about how bricked they are. Heroes launch surprise attack. Then they launch another, slightly different surprise attack. They drop off the liberated slaves, have some dialogue, and then the villains have some nice foreshadowing.

Now, go read through that paragraph again, but everywhere there is a period, imagine the sound of an EXPLOSION. You will then have some understanding of the plot of KotOR #44.

Art
Okay, let me make something very clear. This book has bad art. Really, it has quite bad art. This is not typical for this book, however.

If any comic-book can rightly be said to have an art style that is schizophrenic , it is KotOR. This is due in no small part to the continuing rotation of pencillers, inkers, and colorists alike. For example, Brain Ching did truly immense work on stories such as KotOR: Vindication or the Clone Wars-era comic, Obsession.

However, this particular issue fell once more into the hands of artist Bong Dazo, who has repeatedly provided inferior work during his runs on KotOR.

This particular issue is no exception. Though I have seen worse, this book is highly chaotic, too colorful, and even, dare I say it, over the top. The over-all impression is a book that is incredibly busy.

“But wait,” you say, “if this entire issue is, as you have said, one large battle scene, would not a ‘busy’ atmosphere be appropriate?” Well, yes, you might say that, but the better term would in fact be “hectic.” In a battle scene, one needs to know a lot is happening, true, but that doesn’t mean every single panel needs to be filled with random junk. The fact that this book is crawling with unneeded details just makes things worse: there’re so many lines on the page that it becomes remarkably unpleasant to look at, and in such a visual medium as comics that is an immensely bad thing.

Add to that the fact that characters are not always presented properly (Zayne Carrick always seems to age about ten years during Dazo’s issues) and the natural unpleasentness of certain aliens or technologies and suddenly you have paid three bucks for an eyesore.

A good Star Wars comic understands that a lot of sci-fi is hard to look at, and so minimizes it with softer colors and more realistic shading ala Dark Times or Jan Duursema’s work on Legacy. This issue, however, does the exact opposite, drawing your eye to the unpleasant things while at the same time undermining the few aspects that are actually pretty good.
Certain characters aren’t even done all that badly, but you hardly notice in the steaming pile of busy that this comic presents.

Writing
Here’s the weird thing about KotOR. John Jackson Miller is great. Really great.
Most of the time.
His ability to foreshadow and build suspense over dozens of issues is simply amazing. But then, every once in a while, he does crap like this.
This issue isn’t all that poorly written, but it is very poorly plotted. This generally seems to be the case with small arcs like this – too much action is packed into too small a space, and in order to move the story forward, characterization falls by the wayside. In this issue, each of our multitude of heroes seems to be boiled down to their bare essentials, showing little to no complexity. I mean, this is a battle, so that’s okay to some extent, but this issue goes too far with it.

Thoughts
KotOR #44 is not that great. Maybe it’s just me, but this series seems to follow a set pattern: awesome, large-scale stories with great characters, massive events, light and dark fighting it out, that kind of thing, which are in turn countered by the short, poorly-drawn, uninteresting and artistically lacking arcs.
The issue itself is just another example of this continuing problem with the series. It is a pain to look at, bothersome to read, and, though the events contained within are probably essential to understanding the action to come, on their own they are a boring story with little character depth.
Knights of the Old Republic #44 retails for $2.99. Skip it, but read the Trade Paperback when it comes out.

Coming Soon to Wednesday Shuffle:
Star Wars: Legacy #39
Gotham City Sirens #3
Tales from Wonderland? Maybe? It has to some out someday…