Klik Klik Boom #2 // Review
It’s not the good part of town. There’s a guy sitting at a desk in a hotel lobby. A group of men enters with a photograph. They ask the guy if he’s seen either of the women in the pictures. “You the police?” He asks. “Because you sure don’t LOOK like the police.” And he’s right. There was a gun pointed at his head when he was shown the picture. So, he answers. Says they rented out the whole hotel. Paid cash for it and everything. The two of them are in some kind of trouble in Klik Klik Boom #2. Writer Doug Wagner and artist Doug Dabbs continue their stylish crime thriller with colorist Matt Wilson.
The journalist is understandably freaking out. The people who are after the two of them are going to be there any minute, and Sprout is just hanging out looking at her polaroids. Shouldn’t they be getting the hell out of there? Well...yes. They should. Sprout’s got it covered, though. There’s a reason why they’ve rented out the WHOLE hotel, and it has a lot to do with the guys who are coming for them. As Sprout is mute, she can’t exactly tell the journalist what she has planned. That’s okay, though. It’ll become quite clear once the men come up the stairs.
Wagner reveals a bit more about Sprout and what it is that she’s been through as a kid. It’s a very sharp variation on the “girl raised as an assassin” sort of trope. Sprout is formidable in the face of danger because she grew up fundamentally damaged in a way that Bruce Wayne never would have had to deal with. It’s a very clever origin story for a vigilante looking for justice against a major corporation. Wagner puts the pieces together almost perfectly in the second issue of the action thriller.
Dabbs continues to coax Sprout onto the page with a great deal of charm. As there’s no internal monologue for Sprout, the entirety of her voice has to come from the visual realm...which Dabbs delivers to the page in very sharp and endearing ways. She’s fun and cute and deadly while the world around her is trying to kill her. The menace of the world is brought to the page in a sharply realistic way. The flow of action across the page isn’t always perfect, but Sprout’s charm continues to be deeply endearing in the face of all the horror.
The decision to make Sprout entirely nonverbal might be the single most defining decision in the entire story. So much of the rest of it is a weird construct of different tropes all pasted and plastered and duct-taped together...a bit like something Sprout herself might come up with to detain gun-toting pursuers. The heart of what makes Klik Klik Boom so fun is the fact that there ARE no words coming from Sprout. There’s no first-person narration. There aren’t any thoughts. Only actions and polaroids. It’s such a cleverly distinctive form of characterization for one of the most promising new characters to emerge on the comics rack this year.
