Escape #8 //Review
The Lieutenant Colonel has lost his son. He’s rather upset about the situation. Thankfully for him, there ARE a few enemy combatants who might be in a position to answer a few questions about the saboteur. The first one isn’t helpful, so he’s shot in the head. There are two left. It’s entirely possible that they might be able to be in a bit more of a cooperative attitude in Escape #8. Writer Rick Remender and artist Daniel Acuña continue an engrossing war drama that continues to deliver a darkness to the page that has a remarkably thoughtful and sophisticated script.
Elsewhere Milton’s in bed. He can hear them arguing about him. They’re going to have to get him out of the facility. He’s an enemy combatant on the run. They can’t afford to keep him where he is. The doctor says that if they try to move him at all, they’re going to kill him. He needs to rest. He needs to mend. The thing is Milton...needs to complete his mission. And while they’re arguing about whether or not to keep uhum alive, Milton has the opportunity to head out to the radio and call for back-up that could get him out from behind enemy lines.
Remender delivers the tragedies and complexities of war while still delivering a very solid traditional action story with very recognizable villain and hero archetypes. It’s an interesting balance. Remender’s take on war is very sophisticated, but it’s delivered to the page with the feel of an action-suspense film. War is unbelievably awful. There are war comics that go back to the 1950s that deliver some of that darkness, but they tended to be one-shot plots in anthologies. The longer-run bleakness of Remender’s Escape feels like a real endurance test. It also feels genuinely enlightening as the inner struggles of both sides of a 1940s-style war feel that much more intense.
The brutality of the story is brought to page and panel with remarkable intensity by the heavy inks and dark colors of Acuñas rendering. Though there is the occasionally exaggerated action, motion or facial expression, Acuña maintains a starkly realistic look to the visuals...which is pretty impressive given that the characters are all anthropomorphized animals. The visual world of Acuña’s art sets-in right away after the first few panels and delivers a hell of a lot of tension.
The intensity of the story is beginning to reach its crescendo as Milton’s heading off on his way to be taken out of the war zone. It’s been a long journey thus far. Remender’s delivered considerable intricacy into hs look at the human toll of war and the general loss of humanity in the face of the brutality. There’s no easy way to wrap something like this up without feeling the heavy presence of the emotional reverberations of everything that’s gone on. No happy ending here unless Remender decides to completel betray everything tha he’s built in the first eight issues of the series.
