The Gray Area sounded like something with a lot of potential, the first creator-owned book from major art talent John Romita Jr. Unfortunately, The Gray Area doesn't really seem to know what it wants to be. It's part gritty crime drama, part old school comic, part horror book, part superhero book, part '70s cosmic comic, and if you look at that list, you realize that all of those elements really don't go together, especially with a first-time writer. There are things to like about Gray Area, including a pretty interesting concept regarding the afterlife, but there are so many other missteps, not to mention pretty hackneyed dialogue and some rookie pacing problems, that it's hard to really enjoy the book on more than a "well, it had potential to be stronger" level.
Of course, the selling point of Romita Jr.'s artwork is strong, but not as strong as his best work at Marvel, perhaps because he's not being given as many big visuals or perhaps because the big visuals that he does get are, by necessity, colored mostly in shades of gray. Generally, it seems that artists who do their first creator-owned project create something they like to draw, but The Gray Area doesn't really seem to give Romita Jr. a real chance to shine. Don't get me wrong, the artwork looks very solid, and some of the Kirby-ish splash pages inside the gray area are terrific, reminiscent of Walt Simonson's Thor work, but a lot of the book is talking heads, which is really not where Romita Jr.'s strengths lie.
It is also not really where scripter Brunswick's strengths lie. It's pretty clear here that Brunswick is going for the sort of witty conversation in a street setting popularized by Quentin Tarantino or Brian Michael Bendis, but the style of dialogue reads more like the classic '70s-'80s Marvel popularized by Gerry Conway, Jim Shooter and Steve Englehart. Certainly not bad dialogue, per se, but definitely old school, and it's an odd fit with the story, which features cannibalistic gangsters, dirty cops and the murder of innocents by ganglords which goes unpunished. It's kind of like what we might have gotten if John Byrne, rather than Frank Miller, had written Sin City... it just doesn't feel right, and the tone of the story doesn't match the tone of the dialogue.
There's an obviousness to The Gray Area that marks it as the work of relatively new creators, in terms of writing. The structure plays fair with the readers, foreshadowing the death and potential redemption of lead character Rudy Chance, setting out the rules and supporting cast of his life in the gray area, hinting at the nature of their powers, but it's all kind of over-explained. The story is pretty easy to predict, and there aren't any real surprises in the story as a result. At the same time, the thought that the creators have put into the concept is clear not because of how much they explain about the setting, but because of several scenes where they don't explain what's going on. In issue two, for example, Chance and his partner come upon a giant traffic jam of souls that are about to shift to another plane, but nowhere has this shift been explained previously, nor is it really explained later. It's generally clear what's going on, but there's a sense that pages are missing.
That sense continues throughout both books, actually. Brunswick and Romita Jr. have created something that is the antithesis of the currently popular decompressed trend, but they've gone a little too far in the other direction, back to the type of storytelling that Stan Lee tended to use. So we get weird things like skipping over all of Chance's reaction to his family's death in favor of a "two months later" caption, with a similar transition from Chance's training as a gray watchmen in the second issue. Certainly not crucial flaws, but a shame, given that it seems like skipping over some of the rich character material.
The Gray Area has an intriguing central concept, but the creators seem to have bitten off more than they can chew, trying to blend too many genres and concepts into the story and ending up with something that is a touch too corny for the dark subject matter. There's still one more issue to go, and it's possible that the third issue might bring the elements together more strongly, but at this point, Gray Area is worth it for the artwork and for some neat ideas that mostly get lost amidst some choppy execution.
