Broken Frontier

Bobby and Lucy go in hiding from the bent cops, to the apartment of Bobby’s ex… However, the bad cop in charge, Irv, won’t rest until Bobby and Lucy are dead.

I was hoping that this would be the final part of the "Dead Man’s Hand" storyline because I’m getting pretty sick of Bobby Pope and his ridiculous predicament. Certainly, there is a lot to love about this comic; the art and design, the energy, the 28 pages of story and the cool premise. This arc’s plot is, however, too directionless for me and its characters too empty.

The issue begins directly where the last one finished. Bobby has the detective’s gun and is ready to finish the job. The wily detective has had guns pointed at him plenty of times and knows how to get into Bobby’s head. This sets Bobby and Lucy off into hiding where the only person they can think of to go to for help is Bobby’s ex-lover and Lucy’s mortal enemy. They don’t seem to know what being ‘in hiding’ entails and they run into the bad guys before long for another round of beautifully illustrated fight and suspense scenes.

Jason Rand is a good enough writer (he proved so in the first four issues of this series) that I can believe these characters are deliberately air-headed, vain and unpleasant but that doesn’t make me want to read about them. I can see where he is going, I think, as characters like these are fairly familiar to readers of Elmore Leonard novels. Bobby is supposed to be cute and hapless; a male bimbo criminal with a heart of gold. He’s as stupid as he is good looking and unfortunately that makes him pretty dull to read about. The most interesting thing about him was his scam techniques which, for some reason, we left behind in issue one. The women are slightly more interesting, with their sharp-shooting skills and sexual dominance but there’s a cake being eaten too in the way that they are buoyantly portrayed.

While Rand is (hopefully) saving his interesting characters and plot-lines for later issues, Juan Ferreyra is simply zooming along in overdrive here as he and Eduardo make each page a strong and exciting piece of artwork in itself. Panels are placed experimentally and go beyond the regulation size in order to represent important pieces of minutiae. Angles are used inventively so that the audience feels taken along for a real kicker of a ride while the gray-scale artwork brings out faces and bodies beautifully.

Small Gods has been a great comic which is not living up to its own reputation. It maintains promise, however, a promise I hope it intends to keep…

-Matthew Clark