Comics Fondle

The first Don Perlin issue. Oh, how I have dreaded this day. Perlin goes all out, even has a two-page transformation spread. The nicest thing I can say is Perlin really does understand how to compose a panel, how to do an action scene. That his characters look different from page to page and his attention to detail is nonexistent… well, those are a couple reasons I was dreading it. The stuffed animal on Lissa’s bed was fine though.

The problem with the issue is the script. I was looking forward to Friedrich’s brief run, but here he makes some big mistakes. It opens relatively well, with Topaz and Jack escaping from Paris. There’s a too brief reunion scene back home, then the story fast forwards a month. Jack’s desperate to find a cure as sister Lissa’s birthday is coming up and he doesn’t want her to become a werewolf. Why Jack never scoured obscure texts for a cure for himself? Never explained. Why Topaz disappears for four weeks? Never explained.

There’s the big Werewolf by Night fight scene at the end and Friedrich does get a lot into the issue, but he’s returning the series to its broken status quo here. When the series went off to Europe, it was full of possibility–all Jack and Topaz did in Europe was fight Dracula and get delayed at the Paris airport long enough to fight a hunchbacked mutant… what happened to the Eiffel Tower or, hey, going to Rome?

Even the goofy cop with the werewolf fixation shows up.

It’s not terrible (Friedrich’s decent on the narration and all), but it’s a big step down from last issue. And it’s not even Perlin’s fault.

C

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