Skybound/Image Comics 2018
Created & Written by Steve Orlando
Created & Illustrated by Garry Brown
Coloured by Lee Loughridge
Lettered by Thomas Mauer
The refinery city of Blackstone is the new Russian frontier, stinking of oil, but offering money and sexual freedom to those brave enough to live there. Piotr Petrovich has come for revenge, to hunt his son’s killer. But what he finds is the most brutal fight of his life.
With only two issues in we are already seeing so much extraordinary characterisation in regards to Piotr. Life has been hard and his work was brutal and when he finally did retire he was left feeling directionless and lost. His son unable to be honest with his father and feeling like a man like him has no future he left after coming to grips with his sexual proclivities to go some place where that wouldn’t matter. Only with a father who was a stone cold killer it’s amazing how disconnected the two men were that he never attempted to teach his son how to fight. Granted he probably would’ve been fighting that but still it goes to show just how much regret and guilt he feels over the loss of his son.
The more I see Steve’s work on projects like this one the more I am thrilled by and scared of what he’s really capable of doing. This is the kind of writing where one gets to unleash and flourish and by the gods it’s the kid of work that mesmerises the reader and if I am completely honest should be winning industry awards. The whole flow of the book through the encounters past and present flesh out the man Piotr is and the kind of man he wishes he’d been. Meeting the kid with the stand feels like a standout moment to me to be quite frank it wouldn’t surprise me to see him attach himself to him as some sort of self-imposed penance for what he did wrong.
Now that we are in Blackstone we are beginning to see more and more of the way things work here. With gang style factions battling each other for power and control with the regular working folk caught in the middle leaves little hope. Again this an example of exemplary storytelling and it works by weaving and out of characterisation, circumstances, actions and the work Garry does on the interiors. it’s like to a classical concert that infuses a rock band to create this whole unique experience that you just can’t find anywhere else. It is that fusion that makes this so damn good.
Garry kind of burst onto the scene one day and made such a splash with his unique style which is absolutely perfect for this. The linework is very distinct and he’s able to manipulate the varying weights so beautifully. I feel like everything we see is just that much better than the time before and with Steve the two them kind of “hitting their stride” together is scary magnificent to see. The way that page layouts are utilised and they enable us to see the angles and perspective in the angles shows this beautiful eye for storytelling. I love the attention to detail that we see and everything is so damn expressive and adds that element to the storytelling that words just can’t do. Me wanting more backgrounds will never change and I would love to see how they could expand the city itself.
There is something going on here that runs much deeper than Piotr could ever have expected and he’s going to start finding out how deep this river really runs. It has elements of a film franchises ranging from Bourne to Taken and while the excitement is prevalent and has action galore the story itself has bite equal to the action. This is the future of comics, incredibly interesting solid storytelling through story/plot development and characterisation wrapped up in highly expressive interiors that grips the reader in ways you aren’t going to expect.