Broken Frontier

The battle between evil and, well … more evil continues in The Darkness, Issue #6. It’s just taken on a new form.

Spoiler alert: There is some peripheral information about the identity of Jackie Estrada’s new foe … so if you think you’d rather read the issue first, take off now.

Arriving back at his fortress, Jackie Estracata discovers that he’s been supplanted by an unexpected new enemy ... one that he’s not prepared to fight (at least initially). Estracata’s newborn son is now fully grown and willing to do far more than entertain friends in dad’s empty manse during Spring Break (or pilfer the keys to dad’s black on black Lincoln Town Car (dig the carbon fiber on hood, hefe?)). In fact, Jackie’s badass baby boy wants to best his old man in a fair fight to expunge the only force that could possibly stand in his way.

Sigh …

Makes you wish he was just trying to use fake an I.D. to get hold of a case of Mad Dog 20/20 for a beach party.

The lead up to the fight and the fight itself make for pretty darned good read, filled with a few good twists and lots of action, reaction, and re-reaction. Sonny’s introduction, via Professor Kirchner, was particularly well done.

But while the fighting was good, a few of the verbal asides seemed a trifle threadbare, such as Jackie shouting “You know, you sure talk a lot for a newborn …”. It didn’t help that the repost was followed by, “I mean, whatever happened to “Goo-goo, Ga-ga?” And this is the same Jackie Estacato who later admonishes his opponent, “…Do me a favor, <<expletive deleted>> … Shut up and fight.”

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black …

But hey, if you didn’t have a couple of jabber jaws duking it out, you wouldn’t have one of them use the word “libidinous” right in the middle of a gnarly display of fisticuffs. If nothing else, storyteller Phil Hester deserves full marks for sending a lot of pre-teens rushing for their dictionaries.

The Darkness, Issue #6, is a nifty little page turner. If it has a fault (above the little ones mentioned above) it’s that it depends heavily on a plot device in the third act that probably 99.9 percent of the comics reading world has seen before in one form or another. Does that mean it doesn’t work well in this issue? No. Does that mean you’ll feel a little shortchanged after plunking down your $2.99 US? Maybe … but probably not. Will any of that keep you from coming back for The Darkness, Issue #7 …

That, my friend, is a subject for future review …

And, by the way … “libidinous” means: “having or expressing strong sexual desires.”

Now you know.