Gehenna: Naked Aggression #2 // Review
Towards the end of the second issue, the kid asks her how they could possibly still be alive after all they’ve been through. She tells him it’s luck. Then she tells him to act normal. He tells her normally if he’s being kidnapped, he’d be screaming. So she tells him to act abnormal. Thins continue to be very complicated in Gehenna: Naked Aggression #2. Writer Patrick Kindlon continues a fun, gritty action serial with artist Maurizio Rosenzweig and colorist Matteo Vattani. There’s a sharp breakneck pacing about Kindlon’s story that is amplified by the pacing of multiple quick chapters per issue that make the whole thing feel brilliantly condensed.
Earlier-on she’s entering a veterinary hospital. They don’t exactly try to stop her as she walks past the front desk and into a restricted area. She’s there to get medical attention. With a gun. It’s difficult to get decent health care in her line of work, but these days it’s difficult to get decent health care anywhere. So she’s going to have to get an injection by a veterinarian. Then she’s back on the road with her twelve year-old hostage. And as long as they’re both on the run, he’s going to be asking her questions. And as long as she needs his cooperation, she’s going to be answering them.
Kindlon keeps the action running. There's a wit running through the series on multiple different levels. The overall run of the plot has more than enough cleverness about it to keep the pages turning. The dialogue is very sharp as well. It all keeps moving with the right amount of rhythm to keep it all from crashing into itself. There are moments that feel a little bit inadvertently confusing, but overall the script has a solid sense of forward momentum and lots of fun moments to carry through from one panel to the next.
Rosenzweig’s art works well with the quick pacing of the series. Action and aggression shoot across the page in a clear and concise manner. There's a solid sense of momentum about it all that still manages to look beautiful even a while. It's looking profoundly grew in places. There's a certain grace about the awkwardness of some of the action. As it is gritty and earthbound, it's clearly not intended to look incredibly graceful. That being said, there's a kind of a beautiful toys in the way the action flows across the page.
Being a comic books series, it's very epsiodic. Each issue, however, is very episodic as well. There is a gorgeously percussive aspect to the constant drum beat of chapters within each issue. Rarely does a single issue of a comic book series have this kind of pose. It's really fun to feel it move as quickly as it does. It may take the place of a single issue, but it feels like four or five painstakingly condenses and crammed together like some weird isotope of action. Fun stuff, but it’s bound to get exhausting as the chase continues.
