Chachu #4 // Review
Leila is waking-up in a hotel room. There's something moving to her body and it doesn't necessarily feel like it's her. Everything feels slightly out of sync. Like a bad dubbing. But she's awake. And she's curious. There's a handbag in the restroom. There's a box in the handbag. There's a gun in the box in the handbag in the bathroom of the hotel room. And, of course, they were going to be a lot of questions for.Leila in Chachu #4. Writer Iman Vellani and artist Marianna Ignazzi continue an appealing coming-of-age suspense thriller with coloring wokr by Jordie Bellaire.
And then there's a whole question of the title “Chachu.” She’s asking him about it. Strictly speaking in Pakistani, it’s just there to refer to one’s paternal uncle. But it is sort of a mark of respect. Unearned respect. Respect should be earned. This is what Leila is telling him. And she might have a point. I want one has gotten to be a certain age, it's kind of weird to respect the authority of someone who simply came to the party a little bit earlier than you did. Nevertheless, Leila has much to learn and there’s a lot that she could learn from her Chachu.
Things heat-up in the fourth issue. There's quite a lot of progress being made in the heart of the plot. Vellani’s pacing might have seemed a little bit slow at first. However, she was doing a really good job of establishing the characters. And establishing a reason to care about them. And establishing the mystery. Now that all of that is established, she can start to establish the tumbles and tangled with the central conflict of the story. She's got a really firm and clear understanding of how properly motivated action reaches out across a visual medium. It's impressive stuff.
The art team does a solidly good job of bringing the script to the page and panel. All of the framing is very straightforward. However, there is an artistry to the way that both of drama and action are placed on the page. Once again, Bellaire is given the opportunity to work with some really interesting effects in the color. It's subtle. But it's very impressive. The light tan that seems to dominate everything. This is the desert. This is where it's all taking place. And it just has a stylish sort of I feel to it. The heavy inking of the artist is accompanied by very pale colors in the background and some tastefully rendered depth in the foreground.
There isn't necessarily a whole lot about the story that necessarily needs to live on the comics page. There are aspects of it that would work really well in film or video. There are aspects of it that would work really well live on a small stage. Nevertheless, there's a strength to the story in the sequential art that feels like it's drawing on isolated moments of that much better than it would manage in any other medium.
