Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Alias #4 blew my brains...
i'm guessing that i should treat this as something of a learning experience. i have a habit of reading through half or most of something, writing about it, then having what comes next change everything i thought i knew beforehand. Alias was like that - edgy, interesting, a little slow up to volume 3, and then on a trip to Sydney i picked up volume 4 since a store happened to have a copy.
up until #3 i thought i had a decent handle on things. here was a character who Had Issues and got Fucked Up a lot to the degree that you start wondering whether she's just irritatingly disfunctional, or if she's got something going on that made her this way. #4 deals with the Jessica Jones' mysterious past like a slap in the face and explains not just why she got out of the superhero game, but also that she's not just disfunctional - she's Seriously Fucking Damaged.
what makes this even more interesting is that throughout most of the series the art is done in a very ink-heavy, almost unfinished style. the grittiness of the art emphasises the grittiness of the narrative. suddenly we see a very different style as #4 flashbacks to her past - going to high-school in the 80's the art is in a quintesential 80's Marvel style. not long after we start to see flashbacks to her life as a costumed hero in the 90's which is all done in a clean, colourful mid-90's style. the cover (above) shows a little of what of i'm talking about. it's amazing how effective this is at driving the point home that we're barely even looking at the same person here - think how much your life has changed in the last 15 years and you'll understand what i mean.
without resorting to spoilers, i'm going to say only that What Happened To Jessica Jones classifies as not only the Most Disturbing Psychological Depravity i've seen in comics to date, but also justifies dragging yourself through the rest of the series. with this knowledge in mind i'm finding that re-reading what came before makes a LOT more sense.
from what i've been hearing, The Pulse (Bendis, Marvel) is effectively more continuity of the core charaters, except that Jessica has (finally) acheived some closure, and the swearing's been "bleeped" out. i'll get my hands on it and discuss more at that point.
# posted by Raven @ 1:17 PM 
