Summer Con season brings all sorts of goodness with it, including my annual vacation in San Diego and the Oni color specials. This is the third such special, and it is as always a mix of old and new Oni properties, serving as both a preview of new features and a different look at some of their favorites. Some of my favorite Oni creators are absent from this collection, but there are some new favorites within these pages, and for the most part every single creator made good use of the difficult-to-manage short story format and the rare treat at Oni that is a full-color book. I think anyone will find something to like in this book, and most people will find all or most of the book to be enjoyable as well.
Easily my favorite of the stories in this book is the lead story, "The Operation," by Warren Ellis, Phil Hester and Ande Parks. Sort of Queen & Country by way of Barry Ween and X-Files, it introduces the lead characters and concept while still serving up several gags on each page, and is probably the funniest thing that Ellis has ever written, at least for me. Hester and Parks work in their usual style, but it seems lighter and less dark than their work on Green Arrow, with Han Allred's fantastic colors making it resemble Oeming's work on Powers quite a bit.
Humor seems to be the focus of the special this year, as a good number of the stories focus on being funny. Gail Simone's "Big Snobby Git" is a take-off on a British writer stereotype or two and the always-popular fanboy stereotype as well, and the distance between perception of class and the reality of loutishness is used to great effect. J. Bone's artwork is a perfect match for this type of humor, as well. You'd also expect funny from something called "Kung-Fu Space Girls," and Norrie's tale of the girls hitting Hong Kong (sort of) is wacky, unrestrained and bizarre, everything I've come to expect from the online strips. Meanwhile, "Buddha Master & Angst Man" is a time travel/pop-culture inside joke with characters out of a twisted Saturday morning cartoon and artwork that comes right out of animation as well. There's not a single one of these properties that I wouldn't want to see more of.
Mind you, there is certainly room for some serious storytelling as well. "One Plus One" gets off to a very enigmatic start, and could probably have used more information for those who don't already know the premise, but the artwork by Krall is beautiful in color, and Shaffer does sell the back-and-forth between Coulson and the mystery woman, even if he doesn't provide any context or solid information on the characters. "Technorganic" by Sabina Ex Machina and Rolston, on the other hand, is equally light but provides all the basic information needed, and serves up an intriguing prologue to future stories featuring the character. Another prologue comes in the form of the first post-Coffin collaboration of Hester and Huddleston in the form of the creepy and haunting tale of an astral traveller, which has me even more anxious for Deep Sleeper.
In addition to prologues for upcoming series, there are prologues for series that Oni has already released. Courtney Crumrin's first encounter with her Uncle Aloysius barely scratches the surface of the entertainment that was the Courtney Crumrin mini-series, but it does serve as a nice look back at how the two main characters first met. More impressive to me was the Shot Callerz prelude, which in an illustrated text format seems to play better to Phillips's strengths than the comic-book format has so far, and which drew me in more effectively than the Shot Callerz series has.
Closing out the book are a couple of more abstract pieces. Bryan O'Malley's "Lost At Sea" evokes the dreamlike narration contrasted with harsh reality that was the hallmark of Kissing Chaos, and Kelley Seda's "Milkweed" is just... odd. In all honesty, I couldn't make sense of "Milkweed," but I found it visually impressive.
