3 crampons out of 5

Oh, Churilla, youthful master of the big idea and big setup with the incredibly lacking payoff.  Having read the drawn-but-not-written Churilla ‘The Anchor’ and his Archaia series ‘The Engineer,’ it would seem that Churilla has a short attention span.  Sorry.  I haven’t had the attention span to put out one comic, mind you, and of this I am aware, but look – it’s just my observation, and it’s my review.  So.  Now I start this out with a criticism but look at that rating – 3 out of 5.  Somehow, even though I’ve tossed all of these series aside in disgust by their shoddy conclusions, somehow I would still pick up another Churilla book on the guess that he’s going to be able to see it through to the end one day.  The ideas and images hint at that much fun, and hang on until just the last moment, when it suddenly feels like everything becomes rushed.

In the case of ‘Secret History,’ there’s also the boon of being rooted by a real story – the real D.B. Cooper, who held a plane for ransom mid-air and parachuted free to anonymity – so it keeps Churilla’s narrative from being too loosey-goosey from the get-go, which was a problem in The Engineer that, instead of being narrowed down, was compounded from issue to issue.  That compounding again takes place here, but since the general idea is to provide a reason for the as-yet-unsolved mystery of why the real D.B. did his deed, Churilla is able to distill his plotting problems by cutting back and forth to a government agency to which his comic version of D.B. has ties.

The pitch, basically, overall, is that there’s a government program to get into the mind of another person, influencing them, stealing secrets, Inception-ing them, but it’s failed in it’s application because the people involved tend to go a little bananas.  EXCEPT FOR D.B.  Who is bananas, but is at least still alive.  I might’ve just ruined the plot – TOTES SPOILERS YA’LL – I can’t remember how much of this is “revealed” and how much is just sloppily scripted in-between monster battles, but as that statement shows, regardless, it doesn’t come across as any kind of revelation, more of a justification.  For Churilla’s charm, which is drawing huge beasties.  There’s a strange balance to Brian’s pen, where he has this massive imagination but seemingly not enough patience to fill in all of the details.  So you get Mignola-style blocky art, but it’s not shadowed enough to justify the lack of minutiae, instead, Brian opts for very bright, simple colors.  This means we get panels with swooping, clean lines blocking off nice big characters, but a lot of empty positive and negative space.  And while I’d define this as a style, there’s the problem, as mentioned, of it seeming to get less detailed – and the action less clearly depicted – as the series goes on, like the plotting just spasms to a rushed conclusion and his hand is scurrying across the page to keep up.

The dialogue works as a balance between chuckles and forward movement of the plot, but it always feels a little forced.

And then: I want you to take this all with a grain of salt.  It’s hard writing a book, it’s hard drawing a book, so it must be just as hard – or harder – to do both.  Brian’s ideas aren’t empty, like Mark Millar’s (whoops), where it just starts big and stays big – there’s an honest and apparent desire in his books to turn the story’s in to whatever is in his head, it just hasn’t translated to the page well yet.  But the creativity between the panels and the visually awesome cusp on which Brian’s pen has teetered will keep me at least picking up these books to check them out.