Action Lab Entertainment 2018
Written & Lettered by Steve Bryant
Illustrated by Ismael Canales
Coloured by Emily Elmer
The hunt for the mysterious bronze head continues! Clues lead Athena and company to a deep sea dive off the coast of Italy—but the Nazi occultists are hot on their trail!
Oh ya know this is one of my favourite franchises why because while Athena may be gorgeous this isn’t about her figure or her breasts it’s all about her skills. She’s brilliant, fearless and endlessly inquisitive not to mention a heck of a marks-woman and hand-to-hand combatant. So Steve really does manage to take a great female lead character and treat her like you would a male lead and that alone is newsworthy considering the gimmicky way that the big 2 treat theirs.
So we’ve got quite the quartet going here as Des leads Athena and the others through the underground tunnels of Seville, Spain. The first thing you notice about this aside from Athena proclaiming these better not be sewers is her questioning the legitimacy of his intelligence. This is why I love this character because no matter what kind of history she has with someone she has major trust issues. In her line of work trust issues are not to be considered a bad thing either as it saves her rather beautiful behind rather quite often.
I am very much enjoying the way that this books is being structured. The flow of how it moves through the pages gives it that nice even feel between the mystery, intrigue and action to allow the reader to not only see what they do but also what they don’t see giving us a leg up and be able to use our minds in what is possible to come. I like that because it engages the readers mind and perhaps takes us somewhere we shouldn’t be going but inevitably do and we could be totally wrong about how we see things. So either way what we’re getting here is right up that alley which strong storytellers are able to go successfully.
`Ismael does some nice solid work on the interiors. The linework is nice and the varying weights allow for everything from bold to soft and everything in between. I am particularly fond of the way he’s able to do faces with all the different expressions. What I am not so fond of are the lack of backgrounds, I don’t want to see solid or gradation of colours I want to see things that expand the moment, add to the story and make seeing them where they are matter. I do like the utilisation of page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels though a few less straight ahead panels would also be nice. Sometimes I feel very little dimension and even though we’re in a 2-D media it doesn’t always have to look that way.
Trouble follows Athena like flies on poop that’s for sure. It is to be expected considering her reputation and the fact we wouldn’t have stories if it didn’t. Still for a woman who starts off most of her jobs just trying to help someone out she does end up in the fight for her life every last time. I would think that unnatural if this weren’t a time where Nazi’s were prevalent and trying over to take over the world. As it stands one lone Fräulein who has repeated embarrassed the Reich does need eliminating no matter how useful following her around to steal things seems.
This is all the right kids of action/adventure and mystery/intrigue blend that a story should have in it.