Review of 'The Adventures Of Luther Arkwright' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
extremely impressive work, the art is insane, but two things stood out to me as I was making sense of the alternative history that was at play and what Arkwright's capacities are.
the first is that this is ground zero for what Garth Ennis and Grant Morrison do, whether they know it or not. there's nothing I've read from Ennis that exceeds what's on offer here, but this goes in for too much sexy nun stuff for it to condescend to Preacher, or Wolverine v. Punisher for that matter. compared to Morrison it's quite limited; even if the Invisibles was just self-indulgent, Animal Man had incredible range and was often very moving, even in issues which were supposedly just formal or conceptual exercises.
the second is that if Alan Moore was writing this it would be much better. Moore wouldn't've reigned in the more tendentious world-building but would have conveyed …
extremely impressive work, the art is insane, but two things stood out to me as I was making sense of the alternative history that was at play and what Arkwright's capacities are.
the first is that this is ground zero for what Garth Ennis and Grant Morrison do, whether they know it or not. there's nothing I've read from Ennis that exceeds what's on offer here, but this goes in for too much sexy nun stuff for it to condescend to Preacher, or Wolverine v. Punisher for that matter. compared to Morrison it's quite limited; even if the Invisibles was just self-indulgent, Animal Man had incredible range and was often very moving, even in issues which were supposedly just formal or conceptual exercises.
the second is that if Alan Moore was writing this it would be much better. Moore wouldn't've reigned in the more tendentious world-building but would have conveyed it in the dialogue of a fully developed character whose voice was distinct from everyone else in the volume. Moore wouldn't have had his main character drape the Butcher's Apron around himself, or make that character such a non-entity. Moore would never put an organisation called the IRA in one of books and have it stand for Irish Royalist Army, Moore wouldn't have handled the English nationalism so cack-handedly.
To develop this point further, quite quickly into this volume I had a sense of how Talbot was going to move things to a conclusion. I knew that the sense of fragmentation would increase, that the boundaries between appearance and reality would be dissolving, that we would increasingly be seeing this world and its events through Arkwright's interior transhisorical monologues and that there would be some coy flexing of the author's knowledge of relatively obscure historical events. In short I knew that we were going to 'go cosmic'. Sure enough this is what happens and it's all very flattened and aloof, like some of the low points of Sandman when we're waiting for the main character to remember they're ominpotent; in similar moments in From Hell we're seeing the flickering out of a human brain, the aura that the deep structures of human history might give off if it they could, there are also panels from that book which are legitimately terrifying.
nothing here approaches Moore's work, which is probably unfair to say because nothing does, but the materials are too similar for me not to draw the comparison