Masked Vigilante One-Shot // Review
Russia. Leningrad Oblast. It’s raining in the night. Lightning shoots across the sky. A shadowy figure approaches a very secure facility. A couple of heavily-armed guards are having cheap conversation and a couple of cigarettes. There are a couple of sprays of blood as their necks are cut into by a pair of knives. The title character has arrive ing Masked Vigilante One-Shot. Writer/artist Tyler Kirkham delivers a story with the aid of colorist Daniel Nayaka. It’s a remarkably concise action thriller that seems to know almost exactly how much story it can put between two covers.
The Masked Vigilante has some knowledge of what’s being held at the facility. The facility is involved in human trafficking. A gun is fired. A couple of bodies hit the ground. Two children watch the murder of both of their parents. The Masked Vigilante has come to eliminate those who would victimize others. There’s no questioning that she’s better-trained and better-prepared than the guards that she’s up agains, but that doesn’t mean she’s safe. It doesn’t take a great deal of training to pull a trigger. A single bullet could kill The Masked Vigilante. She’s diving into mortal danger to eliminate the threat of a big human trafficking operation.
Kirkham solidly delivers all of the basic, primal elements of an heroic evening’s infiltration. Not everything that’s being brought to the page IS perfectly well-rendered in the script. Some of the dialogue and narration feels a bit stiff and awkward in places. Also: the basic elements of the story COULD be a bit better-defined in places. There’s a distinct lack of wit in an issue that feels almost completely humorless. Overall, though, Kirkham has put together a solidly respectable action sequence that fits more or less perfectly between the front and back covers of the issue.
Kirkham’s art pummels its way across the page with stylish over-the-top aggression. There’s a hell of a lot of blood, but to Kirkham’s credit, the action never looks ridiculously amplified. It’s all tasterfully rendered in blood splatter, slashing knives and the flash of gunfire. Nayaka’s colors do an impressive job of making some sense of all of the splatter and flash that Kirkham is rendering in ink. There’s added depth and texture that takes Kirkham’s reasonably competent art and makes it totally beautiful. All of the action flows across the page somewhat gracefully.
The one-shot is set in Kirkham’s Final Boss universe. Final Boss is...almost readable, but it lacks a whole lot of depth or coherence in a serialized format. His smash-and-grab style of action storytelling really comes alive in a one-shot that marches its way through a series of aggressively violent encounters. The Masked Vigilante seems like an interesting enough character who could be a lot of fun in a series of such one-shots if Kirkham pulled together enough inspiration to move her through a variety of different similar situations.
