2 out of 5

Painted art is tuff.  No doubt about it.  We gush over Alex Ross, but it not for Waid’s understanding of the medium with Kingdom Come, Ross’ work still falls into the same pit I perceive with much painted comic art – a lack of movement.  When you go photo-realistic, as with Ross, blur lines just hide what is still a dude just statically posed in a position… it’s incredibly difficult to give a panel a legit sense of flow.  When you go looser, it’s still much the same – something about the painted imagery blocks the succinctness of typical coloring methods and renders the look murky – while Muth’s art in Morrison’s Mystery Play matches, on one hand, the somber tone, the level of detail I feel Grant – knowingly or not – works into his worlds made the match unfortunate, as it made composition vs. story questionable.  I’m sure there are more examples of when it works, but for me, the only guy that does it in a way that makes sense to me is Scott Morse, and you can say that that’s because he works completely stylized, outside of tradition, and thus motion and relatability are separated from our reliance on comic norms and we can “read” scenes the way we experience cartoons, with enough remove that the surreal colors and layouts make perfect sense.

Does Mark Badger’s work on The Score screw it?  Not completely.  Gerry’s writing is surely partially to blame:  The Score is a 4-part “mature” tale published by Piranha Press about an alternative world where Hollywood is treated like a gated community, the realm outside of the golden land your typical dystopian slum – and in the slums awakes Phillip Sand, he of amnesia, taken in by a group of thieves and/or whores, remembering that he used to be a star and there’s something else… some reason he lost his memory… something tied to… The Score.  What is The Score?  Good question.  It’s a tune that’s coded with some type of meaning within the story, but these little details I’m mentioning?  Good luck actually wringing them from the writing.  I wouldn’t have been able to infer much about the Hollywood situation if it wasn’t explained on the back of the issue.  Gerry goes in for his looser, music-infused half-written half-poetic style, jumping around perspectives and characters, more fascinated with his story than with getting us to like – even for a second – our lead character, not giving us any real motivation behind his stumblings for identity.  This over-serious version of Mr. Jones can work when its tempered by something – tempered by the constraints of the DC Universe in his Mosaic series, for example.  But given free reign, it’s like he doesn’t know how to string a narrative together.  OR – and this goes back to the art – since a lot of the action sequences are too static to be comprehensible thanks to the painted style, perhaps there were some scripted cues that we’re missing ’cause they can’t be deciphered.

The presentation is nice, and to our creators’ credits, the amnesia set-up is good enough to generate interest beyond the first issue, Badger blending Miami Vice-ish colors with an exaggerated style, making the whole thing seem rather surreal and dreamlike, matching that vague flow of Gerry’s words.  But it’s when the second issue clarifies that this dreamlike feeling might actually just be sloppy, unclear scripting unassisted by washy art that it starts to fall apart.  “The Score” is an excuse of a parable for Jones, and he skips around fleshing out the celebrity concept in favor of trying to string together some kind of noir mystery thing…  Whatever, I’m prattling on to justify the two stars.  The Piranha books look neat.  They’re a good size, nice colors, nice binding.  And I believe that Jones and Badger did collaborate on an idea for which they were both interested – there is an honest energy on the page.  But it can’t rescue it from being boring and confusing.