Any series with a rotating creative team is bound to have an off issue, and for me, Metal Hurlant #5 is it. The stories within aren't really bad, they just don't live up to what I've come to expect from the book, straying either into the realm of the too-predictable or too weird, and while the art is pretty throughout, the stories in general were just average.
As with each issue of Metal Hurlant, there are two stories from Alexandro Jodorowsky here, one focusing on the screaming metal orb that serves as a linking device for stories of various worlds and one a continuing part of the Megalex saga. The opening story is full of the standard Jodorowsky style, with an imaginative and bizarre idea for a prison planet and a story of how hope can infect even such a dark place, but I admit that the point of the whole thing sort of got lost on me. That the prison was built on shaky underpinnings seemed obvious, and that it would give birth to a strange race of angels just seemed strange, rather than making an actual point. The artwork on the story, by Christian Hojgaard, is solid enough, getting across the broken brutality of the world, but the story just didn't resonate with me.
Surprisingly, the same was true of this issue's installment of Megalex. The beautiful, painted/computer-aided artwork by Beltran is stunning as always, but the story segment seems a bit slight. Anomaly is rescued by a mysterious girl, which seems like the starting point for the story, but instead it is the entirety of the story, and Jodorowsky uses several pages to tell us very little about the characters or their situations. While I thought the destruction and rebirth of an apartment complex was a funny bit, the rest of the story reads like filler in the midst of the larger story arc.
The other two stories in the book both start off well but fall into predictable endings, which is a shame because they both have strong art and solid openings. Probably my favorite of the two was the story by Dan Jolley and Igor David, a story with supernatural overtones that feels like it would fit in with Dark Horse's new horror line in many ways. David's artwork evokes creators like Mignola or Charles Burns without outright copying either of them, and Jolley's story falls into an ending that was too easy to see coming, but it's a neat idea anyway.
If only the setup and follow-through was as strong on MacDonald and Lucas's "Second Chances," but it starts off as a sort of gritty science-fiction/crime mix and turns into a weird philosophical ending that just doesn't fit with the story at the end. In the midst of the story, though, there's some neat stuff, including spectacular and detailed artwork from Lucas and a couple of protagonists who are intriguing despite being pretty scummy.
