Second Coming #6 // Review
Can violence really be stopped without violence? Second Coming #6 tries to answer that question, and its conclusion is a bit surprising, but there are plenty of twists and turns along the way.
Much of this issue is concerned with preparations for Sunstar’s wedding. Sunstar worries about weighing his responsibilities to his wife with his duties to the world. While Jesus Christ ruminates on past weddings, and on his past in general. While Sunstar and Sheila go off on their honeymoon, Jesus uses the time to try to start a new religion. Unfortunately, Satan has plans of his own and has teamed up with some of Sunstar’s villains to see them through.
Like any comic written by Mark Russell, this book is an impressive balancing act of the sublime and the ridiculous. Each page is just as likely to make you reconsider something from a poignant new angle as it is to make you laugh out loud. That said, the conclusions that the issue draw seem not only grim, but perfunctory—as though they aren’t really revelations at all, and can be dismissed with a shrug and a wink to the camera.
The art by Richard Pace is impressive in its dichotomy. The pages focusing on Jesus are all handled in a sepia-toned, roughly sketched style. In contrast, the pages focusing on Sunstar are inked and colored by Leonard Kirk and Andy Troy, respectively, in a bold and clear facsimile of the DC Comics house style. The two visual identities are linked by the superb lettering of Rob Steen.
With issue #6, Ahoy’s Second Coming reaches the end—of its first season, as Ahoy has announced that the series will be continuing beyond its initial solicitations after a brief hiatus. That’s a good thing, as some aspects of this issue—the Jesus story particularly—seem unsettlingly up in the air.
