Disney Villains: Maleficent #2 // Review
She who claims to be the mistress of all evil is walking a staircase. She's being guided by a couple of bills that's taken rhythmic meter. It's pretty annoying for her. But she does perhaps need a guide. Otherwise she wouldn't have them with her. The staircase is far above mountain range I'm not bound by common sense physics or architecture. As she's going elsewhere to resurrect the dead in. Disney Villains: Maleficent #2. Writer Paulina Ganucheau and artist Theo Stultz usher the evil enchantress through a dreamy nightmare of a journey that is light on text and heavy with the gravity of the visuals.
Ghosts show her to a cursed tree. She has guided they are through a lost of village of many ghosts. If she can feel it calling. She can feel it reaching out to her. It needs her. And that feeds her sense of importance. She has nothing if not, totally confident in her own power. She's going to need that confidence where she's going. She is, after all, going to call on the powers of the dead. That's not an endeavor to be taken lightly. Even for one who is quite as powerful as she is.
Ganucheau is a storyteller, but she's also an artist. An artist who knows how an artist would like to draw something. And so when she writes the script that she's very short on words. She's allowing the visuals to tell the story. And she's allowing the visuals to tell a story and the way a few writers would feel very comfortable doing. So much of it is drawn directly into the artwork. So much of the narrative comes out of the soul of the visuals. The writer gives the artist an opportunity to fully define the substance of the story.
Ganucheau’s faith is not wasted on Stultz, who does a grant job of delivering the intensity of the drama that is unfolding. Some of the panels are framed with very precise and steady hand. Details might be served by a bit of a steady hand with respect to overall rendering, but the central visuals at the heart of the story are clearly they're in a way that is deeply appealing. The color pallet being used is very dark and somber. Punctuated occasionally by radiant moments that hit the page like moonlight. Through it all the title character is rendered in a resplendent sense of confidence.
It ends up being a very quick read, but only if you're not allowing the power of each individual panel to hit you completely. There's a deep surrealistic residence to the page that feels like it's of being a different kind of gravity. There are some very sharp moments in it within the periphery of everything that feels like it's really leading somewhere they could be very interesting. Maleficent has the opportunity to explore the mythical nature of abstract malevolence with striking clarity. The creative team on this particular book seems to be moving it quite solidly in of the direction that would address, but very hard of evil as a concept.
