Captain Britain and MI:13 #15 - "Vampire State, Conclusion"
(Writer: Paul Cornell, Penciler: Leonard
Kirk, Inker: Jay Leisten, Colorist: Brian
Reber)
(jump to last issue)
Dracula's forces are about to launch en masse, but Wisdom's been laying out plans of his own. Will Britain fall to the vampires? Who will survive?
This is the last issue of the title, and, it perhaps could have done with one more, to make an epilogue of sorts, and not have everything be rushed into the last few pages. Happy endings, and some not so happy, they seemed to pile one after another too fast to really be savored though.
The main thrust of the issue is very good, though, and it's very sad that it has to be the last one. It seems odd to say, but I've been finding it rarer and rarer these days to find comics that succeed not only in delivering powerful, emotional moments (which many can handle), and also plot that doesn't leave solutions (or problems) coming out of nowhere or big dangling problems. This one does.
Review: 3.5 stars
Old Lace is dead, and the rest of the Runaways are trapped in their
home thanks to Klara's powers. Worse, the crashed that caused this
mess has attracted a lot of attention, both from the owners of the
drone, and somebody with a connection to the house.
The dinosaur was never one of my favorite characters, but somehow
her death has severely dampened my interest. It's not the who,
it's the how. It's random and pointless, and although such things
happen in life all the time, for it to work in fiction it needs a
good story around the random and pointlessness, and I don't think
this story is it. In fact, the story so far seems to be completely
driven by accidental events, virtually unconnected to the main
characters in any way, aside from one new character who is drawn
in by all the accidental chaos. The characters have been drifting
without direction for a while, and to make major changes in their
status quo be the result of random factors (instead of, say, the
choices they made in how they reacted to some random event), seems
to exacerbate that problem instead of correcting it.
The new revelation of this issue, the character Hunter Stein,
also feels a little forced, as though the writer was trying too
hard to create a new part of the Runaways backstory and, in
forcing it, made it not feel natural.
It's still possible the writer will be able to turn things around
in the last half of the arc, and, to her credit, she mostly does
well with capturing the character's voices and their interactions
with each other, but on the whole it seems something's missing.
Runaways used to be my favorite title, and now I feel like what
happens in it doesn't really matter as much as it used to.
Review: 3 Stars<
See you next time...
Peter Dimitriadis
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Runaways #12 - "Home Schooling: Part Two: Functions and Relations"
(Writer: Kathryn Immonen, Artist: Sara Pichelli,
Color Artist: Christina Strain)
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