Gehenna: Naked Aggression #3 // Review
Gehenna is having a bit of a conference with Public Defender. This might be totall innocent were it not fgor the fact that the defender in question is hammering into her with a pair of red cesti. This isn’t A public defender. This is THE public defender: a well-dressed masked crime fighter who might have things a bit confused in Gehenna: Naked Aggression #3. Writer Patrick Kindlon and artist Maurizio Rosenzweig. Color comes to the page courtesy of Matteo Vattani. The subtle moral complexity of the series rests just below a very aggressive and violent encounter that rests at the heart of the issue.
The kid that Gahenna has kidnapped is convinced that Pubic Defender is a hero. He’s kind of horrified that she’s doing as good a job as she is defending herself against him. She’s killed a lot of people in the past. Pimps. Mobsters. Enforcers. Drug dealers. She’s never killed a superhero before. Not yea anyway. And he might not leve her with much of a choice, but time will tell. He seems certain that he needs to dispatch her, but he also seems kind of convinced that he’s able to really harm her. It’s just a fight, but...things might go seriously wrong.
Kindlon finds a cool, compassionate heart to all of the aggression, fighting and shattered glass. There’s a real emotional core to it that isn’t often found in crime-based action drama. Gehenna is clearly in a really bad way and she’s in way over her head as people continue to hunt her down. She’s very sympathetically drawn for someone who has just kidnapped a child. GIven the obviously despicable nature of an act like this, one would think that she would be unerringly framed as a villain, but Kindlon does an impressive job of making Gehenna likable.
There’s a rough-and tumble feel to Rosenzweig’s art style that feels like.a perfect match for Kindlon’s script. The art has a tight handle on the momentum, motion and emotion of the aggression between Public Defender and Gehenna. It’s not often that an artist captures a kind of earthbound vulnerability in both people engaging in a fight. Vattani’s colors wrap an exaggerated simplicity about the visual reality of what’s going on on the page. It’s a sharp and tight visual rednering of some of the more subtle and nuanced aspects of Kindlon’s script that also vividly brings across the action of an issue that is primarily focussed on a single encounter between hero and villain.
Gehenna continues to tumble throught he shadows of.a metropolitan nightmare. It’s an enjoyable adventure that appears to be moving into a more sophisticated form than the average crime action serial. The more sophisticated emotional drama doesn’t detrat from the bone-jarring aggression of the action. Nor does the action detract at all from the deeper emotional nature of Gehenna’s story. It works quite well on both levels. Above all, it’s a fun series that has appealing momentum going into its fourth issue.
