Inkblot #3 // Review
Having become a mascot for a group of elf's last issue, a certain black cat finds itself elsewhere. It inadvertently goes for an adventure on the high seas with a sea monster as both cat and monster are caught up in a magical battle between two humans in the third issue of Inkblot. Writer/artist Emma Kubert and inker/writer Rusty Gladd continue the adventures of a blob of ink that has animated itself into an adorable cat with large, green eyes. The nautical adventure continues to establish a light, breezy serial that whimsically whisks its way through multiple different sub-genres of magical fiction.
Inkblot’s inadvertent creator has lost her cat. She’s quite busy with other matters this month. The cat is a distant concern for her. Inkblot is forced to become concerned with its own wellbeing as it rides a cute, little sea monster through The Depths and into the ocean where they both run across Bargeberg--a small ancient city on a giant multi-masted sailing ship. There, cat and sea monster find themselves caught between two warring wizards: the Captain-Commander of Bargeberg and a powerful witch known as Stormlocke. The witch seeks to slay the monster. Master-Commander seeks to rescue it.
The jump from single-issue story to single-issue story has a fun briskness to it. In the third issue, Gladd is starting to reach a deeper sense of the interplay between his words and what’s going on in the panels. Of particular note here is the introduction. The magician who inadvertently created Inkblot tries to keep the nature of the beast in perspective by referring to it as a demon and a monster that is NOT a cat...when the artwork shows that both monster and cat are perfectly harmless next to the uneasy energies of two humanoid wizards. There are interesting pairs of parallels on the page that make for a fun, little story to casually consider long after the final panel.
Kubert’s playful sense of amplification makes Inkblot unmistakably feline. His huge green-yellow eyes are caught in constant surprise, but the rest of it is rendered with a love of feline anatomy. She even manages to make the kitty clinging to the giant sea monster seem totally natural. Inkblot the cat is a joy on the page. Cat and sea monster might be fun, but the rest of it lacks a bit of wonder this time around. Bargeberg is a fascinating idea. A city-sized ship sailing the high seas never quite lives up to its visual potential. The background is competently-rendered, but Bargeberg never seems as immense as it needs to. Relative sizes never quite hit with the kind of impact that they might have managed if Kubert had cast them with the right perspective. Kubert’s art is so appealing that honestly it just feels like she would have needed to switch the vantage point of a few panels and the issue could have been breathtaking.
