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Monday 11 February 2019

Gun Theory Review (Daniel Way, Jon Proctor)


Gun Theory - the theory of… guns? Can you have theories for things that categorically exist?? So basically the book has a cool-sounding but nonsensical title! 

A hitman whose speciality is his forgettable appearance is remembered by a girl during a job - a girl he lets live. Kicking himself afterwards, he decides to go back and “clean up”. Only she’s not the helpless woman he thinks she is.... 

I think Daniel Way’s a very underrated writer. There’s some seriously quality books in both his Deadpool and Wolverine runs and I always liked his addition to the Wolverine mythos in Daken. He can write total crap too, like his Venom series which was a shameless rip-off of John Carpenter’s The Thing, but on the whole he’s one of the better comics writers around - why he doesn’t have a regular gig at either of the Big 2 right now is a mystery to me. If he were writing, say, Suicide Squad, Midnighter and Harley Quinn for DC, I’d be reading those titles! Maybe it’s his choice not to. 

Anyway: Gun Theory falls somewhere in between good and bad. It’s not tedious, unengaging rubbish nor is it inspired or riveting. Like a lot of Way’s comics it’s written quite sparingly as to be an almost silent comic. That approach is a pretty decent match for the fast-paced story though our main character’s hardly a chatterbox so we don’t really get to know him very well. He comes off as a generic sociopath and, because he’s your standard hitman archetype, he isn’t exactly memorable - the other “characters” are even less so! 

The story itself is a typical actioner where our dude shoots anyone and everyone until he needs to be vulnerable, etc. Like Way’s writing, Jon Proctor’s art is slick, though I thought the lines throughout were too thick, particularly regarding the main character (those lips!) - the inks were way too much. 

So not the most original or impressive crime comic but I also wasn’t ever really bored. Gun Theory is a fairly entertaining mindless action/crime story that Daniel Way fans might enjoy though it’s nothing special.

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