Seasons #11 // Review
Spring is quite busy in her bake shop. There are many, many people to feed. Lords and ladies. Kings and queens. The king of Versailles, the Carousel Kaiser, Mia Bambina...they’ve all travelled across the globe for the event. What she has made for them all is beautiful. It is delicious. It is art. And not a bit of it is even remotely real, as she will soon find out in Seasons #11. Writer Rick Remender, artist Paul Azaceta and colorist Matheus Lopes deliver the origins of their dreamy, little allegorical fantasy in an issue that also advances the plot towards the inevitable climax of the story.
All the guests dive into their pastries like animals. That’s when Summer comes-in with her gleaming armor and the Sword of the Fifth Season. It’s a bit jarring, but Spring will learn to adjust when she finds out that she’s actually a prisoner along with her parents and her other two sisters. They may finally be all together, but they’re far from safe. Everyone else has accepted the mirrors of false reality from the Ringleader. If they’re going to be able to face the villain, Spring’s parents are going to have a lot of explaining to do.
Summer slashes into the dark fantasy of a false reality with the Sword of the Fifth Season. Everyone in the realm is the victim of mirror obsession crafted the Ringleader. It’s all very poetic fairytale fantasy stuff that glides across the page quite gracefully. And yet...at the center of it all, it’s a story of a family that’s final coming together on some level having drifted apart. And so there’s a very Earthbound kind of drama driving all of the fantasy, which feels quite well-executed on quite a few different levels. It’s a lightly heroic fantasy held together with the gravity of human emotion.
There’s a pleasantly dreamy fairy tale energy animating the page at the command of artist Azaceta. The line work feels imprecise in palces, but it generally lends the page an appealingly impressionistic presence that dances quite well with the substance of the script. What the artist’s style lacks in neat precision it more than makes-up for in emotional intensity. Azaceta defines the action quite well with clever bits of depth and texture which are provided by Lopes’ colors. Azaceta uses a lighter pastel sort of a coloring range that amplifies the dreaminess of the fairytale that Remender is rendering.
The specific relations between all four sisters has yet to really emerge, but as they are now united, it should be interesting to see all of them work together against the Ringleader. It’s going to be fun seeing that play out in the pages and panels to come. It’s been a deliciously weird fantasy in places. Hopefully Remender, Azaceta and Lopes are able to bring it all together with a satisfying ending. All four sisters have been united. This should be a fun dynamic moving forward into the climax.
