Quick Hites

Joshua Leto

Joshua Leto

— 3 min read

A Comics Review Column

The Quick Hites* Scoring System:

  • Hard Cover
  • Pull List
  • Softcover Collection?
  • Discount Bin
  • You Couldn't Pay Me

Gehenna Naked Aggression #1-2 by Patrick Kindlon, Maurizio Rosenzweig, et al.

Two clipped panels from Gehenna by Rosenzweig, highlights a bunch of characters, including two main ones (a brunette and a blonde) and background actors filling out a street scene.
I picked panels that highlighted the Fingerman-styles that jumped out at me (complimentary).

A punk rocker writes a crime comic? Sign me up. Well, I didn’t know I knew Kindlon’s name from musicland, I thought it was familiar from comics and didn’t make the connection, and I’d never read any of his handful of comics before this. What caught my eye was the pseudo Dirty Pair cover variant on #1 and the Rosenzweig art, which strikes me as fun mix of Jordi Bernet-style layouts, Bob Fingerman pencils, and inked as though Frank Robbins had been forced to put down the brushes and was given a fudenosuke. An interesting mix of Euro-crime/Mad Magazine/70s rush job which charmed me instantly. And props to Jim Campbell’s lettering and balloon style which locks the whole thing together.

The first issue was good, the second a bit redundant, helped by a back-up short drawn by David Ferracci which didn’t go anywhere but looked beautiful doing it. There is also an absurdly perfect obscene cover variant by Nick Pitarra which I saw at thumbnail size in the back of the version I picked up.

I’ll keep on the new issues, but I’ll keep an eye on diminishing returns.

Rating: Pull List, for now.

A comics panel, with a stout man with a goatee staring just below the camera and saying "what the fuck". sliding door he's walked through is bright green, contrasting against a night sky rendered in red and the shapes of trees with spiny branches in the mass of leaves.
The panel doesn't look this washed out in real life, this is a shitty cell phone photo.

Exquisite Corpses #1-2

Michael Walsh / James Tynion IV / Marianna Ignazzi

Comics is overrun with high-concept series, which is a trend I’ll slander at some point, but this book is well done enough to avoid slander even if I don’t think it’s deep enough to hold my attention. There’s an author’s note in Gehenna: Naked Aggression #2 that discusses the need for genre comics to not be that deep, but I wish this particular one had a more little thematic depth. It’s early in the series and the little I’ve read of Tynion’s work it seems he does like to keep some tricks up his sleeve, but I don’t know if I’ll hang around month-to-month to find out. I'll probably skip out if the next issue doesn't grab me and wait for consensus on the series to see if it's worth my time.

The art, credited to Ignazzi and Walsh is decent, with some modern art backgrounds and the strong color work of Jordie Bellaire doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Rating: Softcover Collection?

*Hites are the term coined by Mort Walker for what were always known to me as speed lines. I thought about calling the column "Untitled Comics Review Column" and until I come up with something better, Quick Hites will have to do, since everything else was an even worse pun. (Fumemetti?)

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