Royals #4 // Review
Castor wakes-up tied to a chair. The chair next to him is empty. He can’t hear his brother’s thoughts. For most people this is perfectly normal. For Castor, this is more than a bit of a concern. Castor has no idea where Paul is and his life is in danger. Things are bad and they’re about to get worse in Royals #4. Writer Derek Kirk Kim throws a whole new twist into a compelling series with artist Jacob Perez. The world of Royals gets just a bit more complicated in a chapter that changes thing considerably for the two psychicly-linked brothers.
Paul seems to have awakened in the middle of nowhere. That’s the way that it would seem anyway...until a massive airliner appears out of nowhere. It turns out that he’s at the airport. He’s fully dressed. There’s a passporti n the breast pocket of his coat with a one-way ticket from Seoul back to L.A. He calls for Castor. Castor isn’t anywhere to be found. He tries sending him a though. No answer. The sun’s coming-up on the day and Paul has a ways to go. It’s a pretty lonely walk until he hears Castor’s thoughts come-in explaining to him a little bit of what’s going on...
Kim has been playing with a relatively small slate for the first few years of the series. Fun to watch him do what he's doing with respect to the world and which these brothers exist. The first three issues seemed to suggest a world that's very much like our home. However, as it turns out the brothers aren't the only ones with psychic abilities. And suddenly there's a hole microcosm of possibilities in and within the world question and suddenly things open up considerably. It's actually a really exciting development for a series that was already quite a bit of fun to begin with.
Perez moves the action across the page with tension and urgency that fel palpable. The coloring job on the issue feels particularly imprssive as it solidly sets the issue in a very specific time of day. There’s a very specific kind of latmosphere just outside of an airport around dawn that is almost impossible to capture, but Perez nails it perfectly as Paul wakes-up. There’s also a deeply resonant moment as Paul’s head is fileld with snppets of dialogue from throughout the series thus far that has a tremendous visual effect...a bunch of disemvodied dialogue balloons in total darkness. Beautiful stuff.
In an at all, Kim and Company are delivering a remarkably textured ensemble to the page. Characters that might've seemed like a stereotypes that watched the way aside. Everybody is currently featured, terribly complicated on a whole bunch of different levels. The depth of characterization makes it that much more interesting to engage in the series. Not a good story. It's a good story with characters you kinda like to hang out with. Everyone's flooded on some level. Everybody's recovering from something. It's a very relatable stuff.
