The moon is hollow, aliens live among us, hidden Sesame Street phrases make you shit your pants, and the US government is fighting secret shadow wars across the world - well, I guess not everything’s made up in this comic! Also sounds very much like an Alex Jones rant, no?
Robert Kirkman and Chris Burnham team up for the first time in the gleefully gross-tacular gore-fest that is Die!Die!Die! Volume 1. And there’s a lotta stuff in this bumper first book but not a lot of story to really grab you.
Four brothers, all named after the Beatles, grow up to become top tier assassins before, like The Beatles, splitting up and going their separate ways - except for Ringo who gets his immediately. Senator Connie Lipshitz, a Hillary Clinton lookalike, uses Paul for her various meddlings in geopolitics while Dr Sivana lookalike Senator Barnaby Smith uses George for his own plans. Where’s John? Being all Rambo-like in the woods by his lonesome - except something happens to draw him out of retirement!
Shakespeare’s “sound and fury” quote is very fitting for this series. Every issue has at least two of the following: gunfights, knife fights, blood by the bucketload and several instances of nose-cutting - and yet it’s loud and crass signifying nothing. What was the goal of anyone exactly? It’s just a bunch of people fighting one another, over and over again, with the two Senators’ convoluted, yet nebulous, plans going on in the background. I couldn’t get into any of it.
Kirkman also tries shoe-horning in every character’s backstory regardless of their relevance at this juncture when that space would’ve been better served creating a coherent plot. As it is, Kirkman has someone shoot a nuclear bomb at someone else at the last minute (a la the first Avengers movie and The Dark Knight Rises - the originality!) to give the book a pseudo-tense finale even though it comes out of nowhere and only underlined how poorly realised one of the character’s motivations were.
Which isn’t to say I disliked the book entirely. I’m a massive Chris Burnham fan so eight issues of his art was a gift, particularly when coloured by Nathan Fairbairn. The action looks gorgeous, particularly the fight between Paul’s girlfriend Jennifer and George, Nate and George’s covert mission south of the border, and the tightrope fight between John and George. This is an aside but when Paul and George have their noses cut off they inadvertently look like Michael Jackson!
Some of Kirkman’s dialogue is interesting like the back and forths between Lipshitz and Smith and their differing worldviews. They say some very frank things to one another that you won’t see in most mainstream comics! Because everything in this book is so off-the-wall bonkers, anything can happen, and I liked how the atomic bomb was dealt with at the end.
Considering how poor The Walking Dead has been recently, and how dire his other Image series, Oblivion Song, is, Die!Die!Die! Volume 1, though by no means a great read, is one of Robert Kirkman’s better recent efforts. If you’re as big a fan of Chris Burnham’s art as me and aren’t put off by extremely graphic violence it might be worth checking out.
No comments:
Post a Comment