Radiant Black #42 // Review
There is a politician who is addressing people. It's just in the right venue for it. It is, after all, Millennium Park in Chicago. Plenty of space for people to congregate. That sort of thing. Of course, that's also a lot of room for madness. And as there is a growing concern over certain conspiracy theories, there's every bit of a chance that things are going to get crazy in Radiant Black #42. The writing team of Kyle Higgins and Joe Clark is joined by artist Marcelo Costa with the coloring assistance of Rod Fernandes. There’s a whole lot of personality fluctuating through another fun issue of an increasingly complex series.
Samay isn’t exactly being reassuring. A threat that had come to inhabit the rally has turned into a big Godzilla-like Kaiju thing. The threat is in a form where he’s not absorbing the totality of universal matter. And he’s emitting Hawking radiation on a level that had only been hypothetical until he Godzillad-out. If Radiant doesn’t drop him soon, the thing in question could create an energy cataclysm that would take out half of Illinois. (Maybe Indiana too. It’s hard to say.) Radiant’s clearly got his hands full with this one.
Once again, it's nice to see a competently produced superhero drama that just happens to take place in the third largest city in the United States. There's something distinctly different about the feeling of Millennium Park and the specific politics of Chicago that make it into this issue in a way that field distinctly unlike anything that would have been developed by one of the two major comic book companies. Even though the basic elements of the superhero tradition are there. Then they go back a long way. The writing team has done a really good job of coming up with something that feels slickly written from dialogue to conception to execution.
Costa’s rendering of Radiant’s power continues to have its own distinct fingerprint on the page. It's clearly inspired by a lot of similar tech-based superpower visuals that have been brought to page and panel over the decades. There's something interesting about the way it comes across here, though. The graceful movements that are implied in the action don't just play out in huge aggressive explosions of energy. There's a real feel of subtlety in the buoyancy of movement that the hero has that is brought to the page in a way that feels strikingly vivid.
Radiant Black isn't always this good. The overall run up a long running series like this is going to feature issues that don't quite strike the page in an original way. Quite often the story can feel like it's just doing an echo of a reflection of a shadow of something else. Every now and again, though, this year is really feels like it's doing something completely new but in a way that pays homage to everything that's come before it. It's a fine ensemble. There are a lot of different personalities. It's really great fun.
