ThunderCats: Lost #8 // Review
Ligon is dying. Pumyra is tying to get him to rest. The only way he’s going to survive is by resting. Pumyra has seen a lot of death on THird Earth. She refuses to allow anothe r cat to die, but she’s going to have quite a challenge ahead of her in ThunderCats: Lost #8. Writer Ed Brisson and artist Rapha Lobosco continue their fantasy adventure series with colorist Roshon Kurichiyanil. Brisso’s distinctly sophistocated take on dfantasy aggerssion echoes into a an intriguing, new chapter which braodens the background of the series while exploring an angle on high fantasy aggression and war that is rarely attempted in pop fiction.
Ligon is going to have to take care of himself for a little bit. There’s some concern about something that the rest of the cat are dealing with. It sounds like an earthquake, but Ligon knows it’s not. THe old veteran jnows when he hears something hitting the ground from above...and it’s clearly very, very big. There are giants inth desert that seem to run on some kind of poison. They’re huge, monolithic guards that have been protecting a long-dead border for thousands of years. Pumyra knows that the cats can learn something from the giants...if only everyone can calm down long enough to keep from killing each other.
Brisson renders a couple of clever bits of dramatic framing this month. This issue echoes his rather surprisingly sophisticated work in the Pumyra one-shot with a story of towering sentinels of a border that has been in place for thousands of years. Only...the cats are completely unaware of the conflict that caused the border to be there in the first place. Death could clearly be averted if the two opposing factions could simply. talk, but things are far too tense and no one really seems to know what’s actually going on. It’s a very pwoerful look at the nature of war itself in a brilliantly simple, little conflict.
A big part of what’s driving the conflict between the cats and the giants is a simple disparity in sizes. Lobosco does a pretty good job of framing the giant guardians of the desert against the relaively tiny size of the cats. The basic visual dynamic of small heroes squaring-off against giant enemies is clearly r represented. It IS really, really difficult to frame the action of a combat between opponents of such drastically different sizes. Lobbosco hasn’t quite managed to capture the right kind of genius perspective to really give the combat the kind of impact it could have.
Brisson’s doing some impressive work with an decades-old multi-media cartoon/toy franchise from the 1980s. It would be all too eas to simply frame the characters and set them off on their schtick to collect a paycheck, but Brisson and company are clearly going for something far deeper here that has real potential to be somethig much more than a cell-animated vehicle to sell toys.
