Misery #3 // Review
Cyan Fitzgerald has come to the St. Joseph’s Adolescent Treatment Center. She’s not looking for treatment, though. She’s looking for information. She’s going to find it, but the people with the information aren’t going to be happy. There’s a gun that’s going to be pointed at her in the dark in Misery #3. Writer Todd McFarlane and artist Szymon Kudranski bring Cyan to the penultimate chapter of her four-part mini-series with a moody, atmospheric walk into the darker edges of the human soul. The full balance of Cyan’s life isn’t quite present on the page, but she remains at the heart of the plot as it begins to reach its climax.
It’s the middle of the night. Suffice it to say, she didn’t exactly get an appointment at St. Joseph’s. There was no formal request for the information in question. They wouldn’t have given it to her if she’d have asked. And that’s why there’s a man pointing a gun at her in a dark room in the night. It’s been a long investigation for Cyan. She’s straining her relationship with nearly everyone in her life. She’s perfectly in control of her own actions, though. Those actions might be putting her in a great deal of danger...
McFarlane is working with a dozen different cliches in a story that feels like a skeleton of something bigger. He doesn’t seem to have fleshed-out enough of the periphery of Cyan’s life to develop it all into anything more coherent. That being said, what DOES make it to the page is enjoyable enough. There may be far too many silent moments in the shadows for a single issue. McFarlane may be mistaking brooding for drama, but the whole package feels pretty intense thanks to some very slickly immersive art.
Honestly, if the story is going to spend this much time literally in the shadows, it’s a good idea to have an artist like Kudranski. One might almost get the sinking suspicion that McFarlane specifically “wrote’ the story he did so that Kudranski would have the opportunity to set a whole bunch of nonverbal scenes in quiet intensity somewhere in the shadows. It’s kind of a cool mood of a book, but Kudranski isn’t given much of an opportunity to show a whole hell of a lot on the page that isn’t just...slightly creepy drama. It looks good, but it would be really nice if there was more actual story supporting Kudranski’s art.
The series ends next month. It’ll be interesting to see how the mood draws to a close. So much of the story feels like an extended music video from the 1990s. There’s got to be some sort of a conclusion to it all that makes for some kind of satisfying end of all of the moody brooding is to have any kind of meaning at all. Not that it has to have any deeper meaning if it’s going to leave a strong enough impression to prompt more issues. Cyan DOES seem like a very interesting person to hang out with for 20 pages a month regardless.
