2 out of 5

No.  Delinquents is confused.  It’s a book of, on occasion, astonishing artwork by Kano that seems – even in the first issue – to go for broke with layouts that only serve to stutter the narrative.  It features a setup, by Fred Van Lente, that should be hilarious but is then presented to us in such a wayward fashion as to diminish the joke right away.  It’s written such that you frequently find yourself chuckling, but sensing that you should be laughing, as James Asmus doesn’t fully seem to grasp the difference between comic book and cinematic pacing.

Delinquents is a mini-series team-up book between Armstrong & Archer and Quantum & Woody, two Valiant titles which lean toward the humorous.  Ever since Action Philosophers, I’ve wanted to be able to get in to Van Lente’s fiction books, and thus I checked out A & A when it began, but it just never really hit home.  It (and other similar Van Lente titles I’ve perused) always came back to just feeling like a hero comic with some fact-dropping here and there.  Something about this title being a mini-series made me hopeful that we wouldn’t have to waste time on world-building plot lines, and admittedly a glance through at Kano’s 15-paneled pages was enough to push me into a purchase.  But with Asmus at the helm (from an idea by VL), we’re frequently transitioning between scenes in ways that I can see but don’t read that well.  In film, we have boring establishing shots – a car driving passing a city street sign, for example – that select writers / directors can use more effectively than others to make them more than establishing shots.  ‘Delinquents’ is a book stripped of those scenes, but without something comparable to make up for it.  I suppose we’re supposed to catch up via dialogue, but again, Asmus seems to be scripting things as they would play out on a screen; dialogue and panels happen at a slower pace in comics, and require active reader presentation.  It’s is not a passive medium like film, where you can barrel ahead and force context.  Yes, you can use tricks like this for purposeful reasons in comics, but that really doesn’t feel like the case.  These are sitcom setups – dialogue, change scene settings so that the dialogue becomes humorous –  that make sense to our media-soaked brains (hence the chuckle), but don’t read well.  Thus it’s all Kano can do to break up the pages effectively, which leads to some awesome paneling (a horizontal panel broken into 4 sections with images that crossover from section to section as time passes from left to right) but which are then frequently burdened by the over-achievement; hiccuping pacing is not fixed by hiccuping paneling.  He peels it back a bit in book two, which is much more linear as a result, but this draws more focus to the story – tracking down a fabled Hobo map that’s been tattooed on some dried ass-cheeks (yup, it’s a funny concept) – which really starts to reek of a being the typical overstuffed MacGuffin chase with excessive nonsense sprinkled about so Asmus can write jokes which are conceptually funny but not timed well on the page.

Womp.