2 out of 5
One of a few Zorro books announced / started by new Valiant home (and new publisher) Alien Books, I got this third issue by accident, I think, included in an order with other book – which is important context to note that I wasn’t seeking it out. It is also a #3 of 3, which means I get to experience the end of a story; that can be nice, as a one-off: I can say whether or not the ending satisfies and the pursue the opening if curious; but it can also be a bad thing, robbing me of the build up which makes that ending worthwhile.
By the rating, you can perhaps tell where I fell on that.
There’s a good, concise recap that lets me know that some Franco conspiracy led to “the Mount Tambora eruption, throw[ing] the planet’s climate into chaos,” has led to worldwide revolution, while Zorro (Diego de la Vega) and pirate captain Esmeralda travel ’bouts to stop baddie Seamus McCool, who something something is involved. Fair enough. I had a lingering question about how the climate disruptions have caused chaos, and the opening pages… suggested I wasn’t gonna get much explanation.
I loved reading Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg back in the day, but when I started picking up his then-current books (this was in the early 00s), it felt like he’d lost a beat in the intervening years. And I don’t know if it was that, per se, but some writers are just dialed in on particular books, and fall falt on others, and for me – Chaykin’s appeal seems pretty narrowly limited to Flagg. Elsewhere, his writing always comes across as both stiff and wandering, like there’s some formalism driving it but he’s not quite structuring that formalism to a comic book page.
Thus, back to the first page of this book, with Jorge Fornes arting Chaykin’s script, and maybe there’s also a layer of translation issues, as we combine Chaykin’s inability to really clarify what the problem is with the climate stuff (it is the topic of the opening 9-panel grid), while Fornes’ images don’t 100% connect with the words, or exactly establish narrative beats as we go along.
The issue trades back and forth between our characters and locations, bringing them all closer together, for a pretty good final fight. The choreography of that fight is a bit unsatisfying – whether it was Chaykin or Fornes or letterer Ezequiel Inverni who decided on the excessive sound FX lettering, I dunno; the in-panel use of these is nice (very Simonson, or Ryan Browne-ish), but they’re also over-used to the point of being distracting, and mismatched to what we’re witnessing in an equally distracting way.
If taken page by page, Chaykin’s script gives great personality to the characters, pretty instantly, and Fornes draws the three leads very distinctively, and with solid acting (the tone of the acting matches the script, at the very least). Every other make or female character tends to look pretty similar to Zorro or Esmeralda, unfortunately, and the connection of each page to the overall story is pretty uninspiring, as it’s truly just talking heads explaining the plot until the fight.
