Capes #9 // Review
Roughly 1/2 hour after her plane lands, Riley is at the office. Our shift doesn't start until the morning, but it's really a good idea to get oriented first. After all, things could be kind of complicated. It's a weird place to work. The woman showing Riley around, ushers her that once she gets the hang of it, it's pretty much like any workplace. It just happens to feature some very peculiar coworkers as she’s about to find out in Capes #9. Writer Benito Cereno continues a slightly lame superhero comedy with artist Mark Englert. It’s definitely a superhero story that definitely features...jokes.
As the business of superheroing. Everybody deals with it in a different way. Night Knight works the evening shift, which works out for him. His powers are at their greatest when the sun goes down. He’s just sipping on a coffee when he gets a call that really wakes him up. Bolt is dead. The man on the scene is told to call Commander Capitalism. The Commander is reluctant to believe that someone as durable as Bolt could possibly be dead, but there IS a rather parge sharf of blood-spattered metal sticking out of him and there ARE entrails coming out of his abdomen...
Once again...there’s drama and comedy in a metropolitan business that emplys superheroes. All of the humor is pretty obvious. The juxtaposition between mundane and workplace drama and traditional superhero stories has been done far better elsewhere. The characters don't seem terribly well defined beyond of the most basic and rudimentary level. There really isn't a whole lot to draw the reader into what's going on as it all just kind of looks similar to what's been done before. Where the comedy looks for depth, it only manages to find it in the most superficial places.
Once again, it's kind of cool to see just how close they can come to directly stealing pre-existing heroes and villains without completely infringing on copyright, some things of that nature. The artwork is largely done in a competent fashion. The color seems as vibrant as it probably needs to be in order to really get across the whole superhero concept. Visually at all finds its place on the page. Familiar action takes place in familiar locations that are only modified a bit from how they might've looked in the Marvel or DC universes.
It's a lot more difficult to be original with a superhero comedy than it might have been in the past. So much has already been done. There are aspects of the pulse and rhythm of Capes which compare favorably with say...Edlund’s original Tick comics from the 1980s. Capes lacks the visual appeal of Edlund’s rendering and the sheer weirdness of his writing, though. It's fun enough to use mundane workplace drama with a more fantastic superhero sort of an atmosphere, but the basic foundations do run the risk of undermining the overall appeal of superhero fantasy. Cereno and company aren’t quite managing the right mix to maintain a steady appeal for Capes.
