Charlamagne The God Presents ILLuminati #2 // Review
Lily’s going to make a mistake. Michael’s going to help her make that mistake. They both know what they’re doing and they both know that what they’re doing is crazy. So they’re going to do it. Michael has been making connections that show a very dark corner of popular culture. Lily’s looking to avenge her sister’s death, but she’s going to need more than help from one guy if she’s going to find out what’s going on as Charlamagne The God Presents ILLuminati #2. Writer Bryan Edward Hill continues a stylish walk into a shadowy horror world of the entertainment industry in another issue brought to page and panel by artist Denys Cowan, inker Bill Sienkiewicz and colorist Marco Lesko.
There are three guys in the alley. They’re all armed. What they don’t see is that there’s one woman around the corner with a gun. She turns and fires. They all hit the ground. Then someone yells “Cut!” They have to do it all again. Lilly asks her contact on the sset about it. The woman with thee gone she’s unmistakable as a singer and recording. artist. The woman has an army of Grammy’s. Why is she shooting at people? Well...it’s like this: she’s in music. From usic, you can go into acting. From acting you can go into skincare. “Bam. You’re a millionaire.” It’s that simple.
Hill keeps it simple. There’s a conspiracy. There’s a lot of money. Lives are at stake. Sometimes people die. Let the readers fill everything in around the edges of the mystery and keep the a ction clearly in the center of the panel and everything else will take care of itself. This is a very clever approach to a paranoid conspiracy thriller that works quite well on the page. Don’t hit the reader with too much of the mystery at once. Let the art cary the story.
And the art is exceedingly GOOD at delivering the story because Cown does a very sharp job of framing it for the panel and Sienkiewicz is...hands-down...one of the best artists to ever work in comics. His embellishment carries a mod that is cleverly amplified by the coloring work of Lesko. There’s a grittiness to it that hits page and panel with a great deal of clever finesse. It’s all very. well-rendered on quite afwe different levels. The drama has a powerful weight to it that never really modulates, but it never really has to either. This is a dark drama and everything in it is going to be dark.
The one thing that may begin to be come an issue with the series is the pacing. At issue’s end, the series is already 40% over. (It’s a five-issue mini-series) The plot really needs to hit the center of its run somewhere around the middle of the next issue. Given the rhythm of what’s happened so far, it might not quite get there in time. The storytelling has been really good so far, though. There’s every reason to think they’ll make it work.
