When I reviewed The Couriers last year, I found it to be a refreshing injection of the action genre into the comic book market. What a difference a year makes, as The Couriers 2 is competing with two ongoing Vertigo series that fall into that genre, one of which tops my list of favorite series at the moment. However, the reason I wasn't as impressed with The Couriers 2 as I was the original doesn't have that much to do with the increased competition, but with the inevitable "sequel factor" that makes an original premise feel more familiar and some less impressive (though still basically solid) artwork by Rob G. Wood's story here is also a little less off-the-wall, and while the notion of militia freaks mixing it up with our two favorite couriers is intriguing, it doesn't have quite the same punch as a rogue Chinese general and a bright little girl. However, while Couriers 2 may not be as good as the original, it's no Temple of Doom either... this is still a pretty engaging action book, it just doesn't stand out quite as much as its predecessor.
Doing a sequel is something of a double-edged sword, because it provides a certain familiarity and baseline that lets the story start much earlier but the familiarity can also lead to a touch of boredom. Wood and Rob G make good use of the format that they established in Couriers to open Couriers 2 with a flashy action and credit sequence. The opening sequence, a dirtbike race through the streets (and traffic) of midtown Manhattan, is a nice change-of-pace for the Couriers, which tends to be a mixture of guns and speed, and it nicely establishes the dirtbike fixation that Moustafa has that will pay off later in the story. As for the whole over-familiar thing, Couriers 2 steers pretty clear of it, although the macho sound-bite method of speech that the characters use does occasionally seem a bit grating. This is an action story where the characters know full well they're in an action story, kind of like Tony Scott's The Last Boy Scout, and as with that movie, while it mostly provides a sort of good-natured fun, it occasionally crosses the line into cheesy or annoying.
Wood does a pretty good job keeping the reader guessing as to what's going on with the bad guys of the piece. The rednecks that Moustafa and Special run into come across as not entirely unreasonable folks at first, and I wasn't sure if Wood was setting them up to be uneasy allies who happened to be jerks or if there was going to be more to their role than that. You have to give credit to Wood for the complexity of his characters, even when he's writing something so black and white as an action genre piece. You never have any doubt who you're supposed to be rooting for, but on the other hand you always get a sense of motivation and humanity about the bad guys too.
I was kind of surprised, in reading Couriers 2, to realize just how much manga influence there was on Rob G.'s artwork. I actually went back and looked at Couriers to see if it was changes in how I was viewing things or in Rob G.'s art, and it's definitely the former. Gone in this story is much of the detail that he brought to the cars, the weapons and the characters, replaced with a more streamlined, at some points almost sketchy style that focuses more on action, choreography and speedlines than detail. Overall, I prefer the style he used on Couriers, but there are some benefits to this one as well, notably an increased sense of speed during the dirtbike race (love that shot of the two racers leaping over a cliff) and a very down and dirty feel to the fist/knife fight at the end. The shift in style seems to have oversimplified the look of the book too much, most notably during Ryan's funeral scene where all the characters look quickly sketched rather than finished, but the storytelling is still rock solid.
I'm usually more of a fan of Wood's "lighter" works, like Pounded or the original Couriers, and I definitely enjoyed Couriers 2, even if I didn't like it as well as its predecessor. The same mixture of quirky catch phrases and quotable dialogue, nods to the San Francisco comics scene (including a certain in-house inker who bites it as motivation for the leads) and action movie set pieces makes for a light read, at times a little too much in the style over substance camp for my tastes. However, while Couriers 2 might be empty calories, it's still a damn tasty snack.
