Blood & Thunder #12 // Review
Akeldama is surrounded by the police. She had wanted to work for them at one point. Now she’s totally against them. She knows enough that she’s going to have to stand against them if she’s going to be able to follow her conscience. Even with the advanced tech tat she’s got, there’s no way that she’s going to be able to make it. She’s going to need a miracle in Blood & Thunder #12. Writer Benito Cereno and artist E.J. Su reach a major turning point in their story. Color comes to the page courtesy of Msassyk. With all of the drama firmly anchored-into the series, Cereno and company allow the action to explode across the page in a satisfying collision.
Akeldama’s staring down a small army of heavily armed policemen. She asks her gun if it’s eaten today. Good news: it’s practically full to bursting with materia. She doesn’ want to kill, though. She asks the gun how many stun grenades it can give her. It might be overconfident, but it tells her that it can give her as many as she needs. Honestly, though, she’s going to need more than that. She’s going to need some kind of miracle...
Cereno takes action hero cliches and boosts them up to like...200-300%. There’s a sharp kind of poetry to action hero dialogue when it’s done well. The vast majority of the time, it’s pretty awful. Every now and then, though...every now and then it hits with grace and beauty. Akeldama manages some truly beautiful dialogue here thanks to particularly inspired work be Cereno. The basic premise doesn’t move too far away from standard action hero tropes, but it doesn’t need to. Cereno has done such a good job of giving Akeldama that kind of motivation she needs to do what she needs to do and she’s given just enough heart to allow the reader to really connect with her.
The tension of the drama that leads to the action is brought together with some very impressively oppressive visuals. There isn’t really THAT much of an establishing shot to give the full scale of one tiny woman and her huge gun against the world, but it doesn’t have to be. The wall of heavily armed policemen at the top of the fifth page is more than enough to establish the proper intensity before everything explodes in the big conflict that dominates most of the issue.
The climax in the twelfth issue is kind of dazzling. It’s not giving too much away to say that it’s not a complete resolution to everything. Without being a total cliffhanger ending, there’s a lot left unresolved that makes the lead-in to the thirteenth issue feel that much more intense than Cereno and company have managed at the end of any issue leading-in to this one. Issue 12 actually makes a strikingly powerful case for Blood & Thunder turning into a really, really long-running action series. It’s been a long time in coming, but the series really hits its stride with this issue.
