|
CBG SATELLITES
The ADD Blog by Alan David Doane
|
 PLEASE SUPPORT COMIC BOOK GALAXY BY VISITING OUR SPONSORS
Smoke and Guns
It's Moon's art that makes Baldock's concept so invigorating in the
first place. Every facet of the fight between The Grand Avenue Puffs
and The Belles becomes as exciting as it's promised by the way Moon
brings them respectively to life on the page. Their city streets and
smoky rooms all benefit from Moon's apt way of going from very solid
and stark use of black and white to the feathery but thick line he
constructs people and urban buildings out of. The sexiness of lead
cigarette girl Scarlett and her comrades is clear in Moon's mastery of
body and facial movements, as well as some sly panel compositions.
Every outfit that the ladies wear gets as much reverence as the
violence in this book and I assure you there's a lot of violence. Moon
manages that excellently as well with all the bullets and explosions
graced with some kind of elegant mania to them (the wonderful
lettering job by Moon with those letters rattling like the bars of
steel cages just help the wonderful look of this book). One of the
most charming aspects about Smoke and Guns is that Moon uses
these splatters of white puffs around people and light sources (as
well as dark puffs when the fists and bullets start flying). It
creates an aura that is somewhere between heavenly light and cigarette
smoke, which is where Scarlett and her friends probably find
themselves in between.
As much as I was seduced by Moon's illustration choices, I was wishing
Baldock would make some real choices with the story. Not that there's
much wrong with wall-to-wall action pitting sassy, confident female
against sassy, confident female. It's when this concept has it's own
graphic novel to fill out that the writer needs to add some other
wrinkle to these characters and the story because the concept itself
is not enough to make the book stand. There's little pathos or
thoughtfulness to get in the way of the action and in one way that is
a smart move else things start to slow down. Yet the reader is given
little reason to care about the gang wars or whether the characters
live or die when the book is missing just that much humanity. The end
of the book features the death of a character we meet at the start and
when it becomes clear that the death was just more fodder for
cigarette girl chaos the book's problem becomes its most exposed.
Smoke and Guns has a lot going for it but didn't quite end up
such a satisfying package at the end. It would probably be served best
as a series of 5-to-8 page stories in an anthology, where I'm sure it
would be the highlight of that compilation. The book does give us Moon
showing off some fantastic skills and that's pretty damn sweet in
itself.
-- Ian Brill
Send review copies to:
|
Sometimes a concept is so wacky it becomes irresistible. Warring gangs
of cigarette girls seems like one of those concepts. It's something
that comes with plenty of style and carnage (and perhaps a very
adolescent appeal but that just makes it that much cooler if you ask
me). The unfortunate thing about Smoke and Guns is that the
cool idea behind it loses its appeal about halfway through. The best
thing about the book is that throughout we have the wonderful artwork
of Moon to soak up for the entire read.