3 out of 5

Joe Keatinge writes comics weird.  Not weird comics, although yes, he does that somewhat as well – but rather his approach to writing comics is weird.  This stretches back to the first piece that caused me to take notice of Joe, a short in Image’s Next Issue Project, and might be the perfect encapsulation of how his method can work: worlds and stories created before you’ve arrived; you bearing witness to events already in motion.  It can be polarizing.  For Next Issue Project, this went with the vibe of that series’ cheeky Golden Age approach, but it can be uneven when applied to ongoing projects or tales that are meant to fit within an existing framework, like Joe’s work for Marvel.  To be clear, this isn’t exactly world-building, or Morrison-izing.  The former because, to me, world-building is fleshing out a reality you’re establishing, and part of Joe’s uniqueness – in my eyes – is that he tries to seat the fantastic within the regular.  Shutter, for example, takes place ‘on an Earth way more fantastic than the one you’re existing in’ (from issue #3’s back cover summary), and this is just taken for what it is.  Instead of clouding a talking cat clock in backstory mystery, or trying to explain why a rotund mustached robot and ghost ninjas run a giant walking chicken house, or why there’s a gang of lion assassins, these things just are.  It’s just the way the world works.  And this would seem like weirdness for weirdness’ sake if Joe was constantly pointing a finger at it, but instead, a la Brandon Graham (who does a cover for #1) and James Stokoe, it’s just how Joe sees this story, and our focus is most certainly on lead Kate Kristopher’s pre-mid-life crisis.  So our potential weird-guy comparison is Morrison, but Grant is almost always up to something with his concoctions, and that something is almost always explaining that our existence is just a 3rd dimensional bubble for some 4th 5th and 6th dimensional being, and every version of Batman has always existed and always will.  Whereas Joe seems happy to write a comic book without spiraling it into universal interconnectedness.  No criticism either way: I dig a good Grant story, and I can dig a good non-Grant story.

So.  Joe writes weird comics because he drops us in the shit but seems to be unaware of how messy it is, and so presses forward.  Hell Yeah! had bluster (and lord I hope that story continues one day…), and Glory required something of a mystery format for its build-up, but ‘Shutter’ is just like pure glee.  Keatinge is having fun.  It shows.  The book bristles with… something… with this bold sense of design and unified presentation and a bold smile.  Kate is a world-famous explorer whose days of exploring may be over, until she’s waylaid by some crazies who alert her to the presence of siblings of which she’d previously been unaware.  This first arc proceeds waywardly to fill in blips of Kate’s past, leading up to her finally meeting one sibling and then going on the run, continuing a road-trip vibe that the series will probably stick with.

But… it just hasn’t really clicked yet.  ‘Shutter’ is so over-joyed to exist that it hasn’t really yet had the chance to offer us a reason for its existence.  As ‘Hell’ plays in the superhero pool, pulling some soap-opera reveals works, contextually, and Glory came with past baggage that was fun to sift through.  So here’s where Keatinge’s weird style is really going to be hit or miss, because we’re truly just coasting off of energy right now and not enough substance.  It’s fine; I do have faith in his work that it will at least be an interesting experiment (even Morbius was a fascinating failure), but, for example, issue #1’s cliffhanger of the siblings reveal held absolutely no weight…  when we’ve only had pages to meet Kate and get a snippet of background on her story.  Things settle down a bit as the arc moves on such that #6 doesn’t really have a conclusion (I suspect this won’t clean up into trades very well, so they’re just choosing stopping points), but we have a better sense of pacing and tone so that the random splatter of plot holds more securely.

All this blabber being said about the writing, I sort of have to risk my mad popularity and credibility and take everyone else involved to task.  Because – if I can bring Hell Yeah! and Glory up yeeet again – I think those books were also able to ride out Joe’s style due to a very strong artistic representation.  On Shutter, I think that artist Leila del Luca’s still panels are fantastic.  She has an awesome sense of ‘directing,’ setting the reader’s eye in an ideal spot to communicate scope or story.  These moments or panels are effective because she has a rather busy pencil – a lot of defining lines, hefty use of sketchy, thick shadows.  Nothing actually feels still in these still panels, but that appropriately matches the nervous energy with which Joe writes.  Unfortunately, this doesn’t translate as well to the panels which should be in motion.  My eyes would immediately blur when I got to these pages – which are part of every issue – and I never got the sense of urgency which was intended.  They’re almost too busy, and the actions don’t feel like they sync up, like character A is moving to the left and character B is reacting to that motion to the right, if that horrible example makes sense.  She is not ably assisted by colorist Owen Gieni.  Owen’s colors are awesomely subtle shades, really gorgeous, but are too smooth to counter Leila’s sketchy style.  So while the eye-grabbing design (Tim Leong and Monica Garcia) is impossible to avoid on the comic rack, the interiors – while done up by professionals – don’t carry the same effect.  Rounding out my cranky criticisms, Ed Brisson’s lettering is, similarly, too busy.  I couldn’t help but feel like he gave everything just a sketch too much space, adding to the crowding of the pages.

Weee.

Anyway.  This is why the book feels uneven right now, and doesn’t break out into a higher rating for me.  But – I’m still excited to see where it goes, and this is a unique creation for everyone involved to be proud of because that bristle is definitely a team effort.  Besides, going by the letters pages, everyone’s in love with everyone, so I’m just a cranky online guy.