Red Hood #1 // Review
Jason Todd has gone to New Angelique to investigate a string of deaths that have been popping-up on internet video. They all seem to bounce IP addresses all over the world, but they all seem to have an origin in New Angelique. Given the fact that he dresses the way he does, it’s not going to be difficult for any interested parties to track him down in Red Hood #1. Writer Gretchen Felker-Martin delivers the opening chapter of a series that’s already been canceled by DC just one day after the first issue was released. The issue is brought to page and panel by artist Jeff Spokes.
Jason is a driven man. Ease traveled halfway across the country to search for himself in human darkness. There's real darkness and what he's exploring. But there's also real darkness in who he is. He seems to be as motivated by one as he is the other. He's lost. But he's looking for himself in a very dark place. Invariably there will be trouble. Invariably there will be violence. But exactly what it is. That happens from there is lost in the shadows of chance and circumstance and the author’s reaction to a single bullet on this side of the comics page.
Felker-Martin has the hard boiled sense of humor down quite well. The greedy street level action is pulled away from a familiar locations and into a space that is distinctly new. That being said, the actual crime that's hitting the page is not necessarily anything terribly compelling. The title character is interesting enough to be well worth the purchase of the issue. That and the rather strange place in political history that this particular book happens to fall into. It's interesting stuff. And it's kind of compelling to see something like this, so thoughtfully laid out knowing that he's never going to see even a second issue released.
Spokes doesn't layout the action on the page so much as stack it. There's real dedication to long horizontal panels that are stacked on top of each other. When the action really gets going, they sort of slide and sag in a wee that would be kind of repetitious were enough for the fact that the action is so well executed on the page. There's a lot of detail. A lot of gritty detail. However, the architectural backgrounds stay in the background. And any location that would be so far removed from the main East Coast focus so much of the. traditional DC universe really deserves a little bit more rendering around the edges.
It’s remarkable just how quick DC was to cancel this series after her comments on the murder of radical right-wing political pundit Charlie Kirk. Not much time had passed since the man's death before the author made comment. The series’ cancellation wasn’t that much later than that. Everything changed on this series in something like 24-48 hours. It’s pretty staggering how quickly it all happened.
