Blue Falcon and Dynomutt #5 // Review
He tells her to untie the doctor. His dog strongly suggests that she do as he says. She’s not really impressed by his presence. She tells him that if he and his dog don’t calm down, she’ll rip the doctor’s face off. She knows who he really is behind the mask. And there’s a man pointing a shotgun at both of them. Things are tense at the beginning of the fifth issue of Blue Falcon and Dynomutt #5. Writer Jimmy Palmiotti and artist Pasquale Qualano conclude their dark treatment of the old Hanna-Barbera hero in an issue featuring the coloring work of Jorge Sutil.
Blue Falcon is also concerned about the wellbeing of Violette Valentine. Such a thing might normally conjure laughter in a supervillain like Beast Woman, but she’s got an entirely different reason for laughing at the hero’s concern. Dynomutt confirms his own suspicion with a few sniffs. Turns out Beast Woman IS Violette...someone Blue Falcon has trusted. So things are considerably more complicated as the hero comes face-to-face with someone who has been manipulating him. Dynomutt has something similar with the guy with the shotgun: he’s killed Dynomutt before. He’s aiming to do so again.
Palmiotti plays with a strange intersection between light Saturday morning, superhero action, and something altogether more brutal. Some of the dialogue suggests something much more disturbing than what would have been allowed on network TV on Saturday mornings back in the late 20th century. It's kind of a weird fit. Because the character was more or less designed as being family friendly Saturday morning’s answer to what had been going on in the comic books at the time. It's a very narrow target to hit to find a space that would be true to the original character while also being true to something that would be much more sophisticated. Palmiotti manages to thread the needle quite nicely with a satisfying ending to a partially enjoyable series.
Qualano’s framing of the action features a lot of dramatic close-ups. Lots of lines of intensity which add some drama to a largely clean line to representation of everything. In absence of a whole lot of rendered detail in and around the edges of the action, Sutil’s colors provide a simple depth and texture that improves considerably on the visual style of the original Saturday morning, animation without transforming it into something else entirely.
Palmiotti, Qualano and Sutil do a respectable job of bringing the character into more of a contemporary aesthetic. It's kind of a weird exercise, though. The character had been so completely defined by the format in which he had been brought to the screen originally. Trying to turn him into something a little bit more sophisticated is an admirable attempt to make him a little bit more relevant to the contemporary world. Hannah-Barbera’s strange mutation of Batman is generally enjoyable enough on his own. And darkness creates a level of doubt that doesn't really engage in any way. It's necessarily deeper automatically. It's just more fun than the original cartoon had an opportunity to be.
