Broken Frontier

Bobby Pope, in desperate need of help, goes to his ex-girlfriend’s bar. How long can they hide before Detective Irving’s men track him down?

Small Gods has been a startling good comic from a previously unpublished author. It has to its credit a strong and interesting mythos whereby psychics and telepaths are common and even regulated by the government. Rand has decided to use this setting to tell a series of loosely connected crime stories. This is a highly applaudable idea and it makes for some fresh reading. Unfortunately, the plot on this second story is starting to show a distinct lack of the meat which made its first arc so successful.

Bobby Pope is a con man and knockabout dude who has gotten himself in some hot water with a bunch of crooked cops. They want to kill him because he witnessed a massacre at their hands in the last episode. The plot does not advance very far in this issue other than to get Bobby a sidekick in the form of an arse-kicking ex-girlfriend. Oh, and there is one of the most exciting car chases ever put down on paper!

Rand certainly knows how to write a good fight scene, he knows what his artists can do and in this issue, he pushes them to exciting and exhilarating extremes. Unfortunately, Rand does not know how to write girls. I noticed this a little in the last story arc; the females were ciphers through which his male characters developed. The same is true here; Lucy is unfortunately not a real character unto herself but rather a focus point for Bobby’s feelings of shame, love and maturity. She knows how to kick arse and that is fine in a girl – once the arse kicking starts, the book improves dramatically!

Juan E. Ferreyra and his brother Eduardo have this book’s artwork sorted out and continue to impress! There is a car chase in this book that simply zings with tension and one can almost here the engines roar and smell the tyres burning. There are times when their art overestimates the musculature of these seemingly normal humans and the scene of almost-but-not-quite nudity is almost laughable and not a little distracting from the conversation at hand. Despite these minor squabbles, the art in Small Gods is simply superb.

Despite a rather simplistic plotline in this second arc, there are still clear signs of what Rand showed us in the first Small Gods arc. I hope he returns to that higher quality of work soon.

- Matthew Clark