King Kong: The Great War #2 // Review
The captain of the German submarine doesn’t know where they are. He doesn’t know how they got there. He’s pretty sure that they’re not dead. If he’s wrong, they must be in Hell. It’s 1917. He and his crew have been shipwrecked for a full day. And there are pterodactyls flying overhead. This is the opening to the second issue of King Kong: The Great War #2. Writer Alex Cox continues a tale of Kong during World War I. Artist Tommaso Bianchi renders the world of Skull Island to the page. The brutal world is given further life by colorist James Devlin.
Heinrich got pulled into the mud of the swamp by a couple of grey tentacle-like appendages. The captain can’t do a lot. If he’d ordered the crew to shoot at the thing, Heinrich would have died from the gunfire. He assures everyone of this, but it’s a small consolation for another death in the jungle hell of an island on the other side of the Earth. Having served in the Great War, the men have become numb to bloodshed and human misery. It’s different when that bloodshed is coming directly from the heart of nature, though. It’s different when a giant monster walks the jungle.
Cox puts Kong firmly in the background of an issue that focuses more on the vicious world of the jungle than it does anything else. Cox takes soldiers in one of the most brutal wars imaginable and places them in one of the most dangerous and predatory environments possible. It’s a fun contrast that serves the issue well. There are a lot of different ideas that the writer could draw from in search of increased tensions on Skull Island. Cox finds an interesting progression of threats for the second issue of the series.
Bianchi and Devlin do some work establishing the setting of the island with establishing shots. (The title spread features a beautiful aerial view of the beach.) For the most part, though the art team anchors the visuals into the action in the foreground, they’re following Cox’s lead in focusing on the soldiers as they enter the jungle rather than the jungle itself. The drama does an excellent job of drawing in the reader for the sudden bursts of action when they hit the page. It’s an effective way to tell a tale of squad-based survival.
The title character really needs to have a bit more of a presence on the page. There are a couple of moments when Kong is quite prominent, but there isn’t nearly enough of a focus on him in the second issue. He’s this ominous monster in the background that defines so much of what’s going on in the foreground...but only thematically. Cox and company DO seem to be setting up some kind of a showdown between the shipwrecked Germans and the title character, but they’re definitely taking their time with it. This is perfectly okay so long as there’s a satisfying pay-off coming at the end of the series.
