I’m curious what Warren Ellis’s script for this issue looks like… it must be really short. Maybe he draws on the pages, thumbnails, sketches, something. Because he can’t be writing much on them. This issue has almost no dialogue after the first five or six pages.
So it’s all up to Cully Hammer and he does a decent job of it. He’s got to infuse the story with humor but also with horrific violence. He gets the humor part down, the horrific violence not so much. In fact, the action sequence closing the issue is a bit of a bore. The one or two panel emphases on protagonist killing someone–three in this issue’s present action–are supposed to mean something. There are similar flashback panels to show how the protagonist is devastated after being a CIA assassin. It doesn’t work.
But it’s nearly okay. Maybe if the exposition weren’t so forced.
