Good As Dead #5 // Review
Their mission was to fight terrorism. They wanted Jonathan to create a mass delivery system. They wanted him to find a way to weaponize a toxin. Then things got ugly. There’s a notebook, though. If the right people can see it, there might be some accountability. The people who need to face justice might just be forced into court. Before the Sherif can get to that, he’s going to face a threat they can’t s ee in Good As Dead #5. The writing team of David and Maria Lapham reach the penultimate chapter of their story in another issue broght to page and panel by David Lapham and colorist Dee Cunniffe.
He’s an invisible man. (Kind of.) They altered his pheromones and electrical meridians to eliminate all provocation of proximity response. You’re not going to see him unless you’re staring right at him AND caring about what you’re looking at. Of course...if it’s a matter of life and death, and you KNOW it’s a matter of life and death, then you’re sure as hell going to care about what you’re looking at. The sherif is going to lose his patience waving around a flashlight in the dark. “Kill me,” he shouts into the darkness, “ors stay the f#@k out of my way!”
The Laphams weave a very tight suspense thriller. They got a quickly paste and quickly plotted maze to throw their heroes through. There really is a hell of a lot going on in the issue. There's also quite a lot of death. It's one of the more bloody issues in the series. This presents kind of a serious issue with the narrative. There are so many ideas that are presented in the course of the script that really could be explored to greater depth where they simply to allow those ideas to play out just a little bit more. As it is, the plot needs to get from point A to point B. And they seem to have way too many ideas to cram into the narrative path of the issue.
David Lapham does a very respectable job of keeping the action moving without making it feel at all rushed. Visually it feels really tight. There might be something of a lack of precision in the execution of the art, but the overall spirit of it has brought across with great intensity. The atmospheric gravity of the issue is brought to page and panel quite cunningly by Cunniffe’s colors. It feels like it's coming at all the right angles visually. There aren't any major moments of impact that run across the page in any way that feels amplified, though. It's all laid out in a very straightforward fashion. This gets to be a problem with an issue featuring as much action as this one has. Gunfire. Bloodshed dramatic tension. It all tends to blur together.
In the endnotes, they say that there are major revelations that await in the final issue. There is no doubting that. It's unclear as to exactly how much he's going to be revealed, though. As fun as the series has been so far, there's a good chance that big revelation at the end of the series might derail everything. Lapham and Lapham and I don't a really good job if it so far, though.
