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ELEKTRA & WOLVERINE: THE REDEEMER #1 (Best of the Week!)
Highly Recommended (9/10)
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Marvel Comics
Writer: Greg Rucka
Artist: Yoshitaka Amano
Editors: Axel Alonso & Jennifer Lee
Price: $5.95 US/$9.00 CAN |
I love Greg Rucka's comics writing, and I enjoy his prose work as well. I was captivated by Yoshitaka Amano's painted art on Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: The Dream Hunters. Nevertheless, I didn't know what to expect from this expensive limited series. It featured two characters that I rarely cared for, as I've found they're often difficult to relate to; they lack a grounded humanity, for the most part.
I should have had more faith in Rucka's pen (or word processing program, I suppose).
Though she's helped heroes and fought villains, Elektra is, first and foremost, a ninja assassin. She kills people for a living, and she's been hired to end another life. The problem is that this time, she's caught in the act, and a teenage witness can identify her. A former Canadian agent is brought in to protect the girl and her mother, and that agent just happens to have superhuman senses, a mutant healing factor and adamantium claws.
Rucka opens the story with Elektra's successful attempts to infiltrate a tightly guarded residence. One would think that trying to convey the actions, thoughts and skill of a ninja assassin would be a Herculean task, that it would come off as corny and false. But Rucka instills in the scene a level of detail and tension that makes the reader feel that s/he is there, looking over Elektra's shoulder. It's the little details that sell it... that four inches separate Elektra from an unsuspecting little girl, that the assassin hides her sais so they do not catch the light. Rucka breathes a shocking degree of reality into a most unreal situation.
Amano's art grants Elektra an almost alien appearance, adding to her mystique and the air of menace she exudes. The sketchiness of the art conveys lithe movement quite well, but it also adds a surreal tone to the action. The only real problem with the art is that it doesn't always correspond with the prose story, and sometimes the images are laid out next to the wrong bit of text.
The art of bodyguarding is one of Rucka's favorite topics. He's built a successful line of novels around the idea, and he's brought it into play in DC's Batman comics. In this book, he transforms Wolverine into a bodyguard. His voice shifts when he meets his "client," and it sounds more than a little like Atticus Kodiak, the hero from most of Rucka's books. Still, that voice boasts a genuine tone, and Rucka is convincing when describing the details of Wolverine's analysis of the girl he's been recruited to protect and her mother, not to mention his frustration with mistakes he makes during a climactic fight scene.
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