Radio, murder and noirish temporal shenanigans await you in pistolwhip. Dames, detectives and a mysterious violinist populate this mystery—the sort of characters I can get into on a foggy day—but for some reason I just couldn’t engage with this story. Usually I am up for a spot of metafiction-y mindfuck, (here the seemingly straight forward drawn story is interspersed with a radio scripts that become increasingly to seem that they are driving the action), so I don’t think it was the structure of the story that threw me out of the book. As much as I don’t want to say it, the distracting factor in pistolwhip is the art.
Matt Kindt’s long strokes, while adding fluid movement to his work, end up making my eye do more work than it wants to. His cartoony characters can look quite different from panel to panel and that made it really hard for me to instantly be able to place the action in the story from page to page. Often just a single characteristic like a hat or hairstyle differentiates lets you know who’s who from page to page. This was a huge problem for me in 2 Sisters, which I couldn’t even finish. In pistolwhip the characters are a lot more distinct but didn’t seem to fit with the dark and dirty feel of the story.
I’ll probably try to read it some other time, but this is not a book for when you’re easily distracted.
3 comments:
While I find his way of making comics and the overall package of his books very fun, I'm often not sure if what you descibed with the art is intentional.
You know, keeping it lighthearted by making the characters look a bit, say, more simple (stupid word!) and approachable in comparison to the content he chooses. Maybe - I don't know his work THAT good - some things like the recognizable features fall to committing to said (drawing) style in the storytelling.
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I have a question: Could you review a comicbook of you reading past that you reallyreally love and why?
Not "Raisin' Pie"!
Sure I could. I'll consider it a special request. Look for it in the next few weeks.
COOL!
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