Captain Marvel #10, 11, by Kelly Sue DeConnick * Christopher Sebela (writers), Filipe Andrade (artist), Jordie Bellaire (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - I like the visual of Carol leaping across rooftops with some small-time burglar (complete with domino mask and striped prison shirt). But the way the Carol on the poster is smiling creeps me out. It's her cheeks, they're too shiny, too cherubic, it's freaky. I know, that was the style at one time, and Quinones is trying to evoke that. And he does a good job of it, but it's still freaky looking. Also, I notice Quinones has Carol rocking her new hairstyle on the covers, but Andrade has gone back to the long, flowing locks. I don't care one way or the other - though the new haircut gives Carol a more distinctive look - I'd just like everyone to get on the same page.Carol, having been told there's a lesion in her brain that moving deeper into her brain every time she flies, so she should not fly, does what most people do when they get news from the doctor they don't want to hear: She ignores it. She gets angry when Frank Gianelli tells her he's going to hire a different pilot until her situation is sorted. She charges out to do her Captain Marvel thing, and nearly passes out after lifting a subway train. Frankly, that doesn't seem like an unusual response to lifting and dragging a train, but I still like it because I've had that response. Where I know I'm sick, or might be getting sick, and every little ache, pain, or sneeze, is a sign of doom. Carol also tries to turn down Captain America's offer of his flying motorcycle, but her assistant Wendy paints it up in Carol's colors and hires Dakota North to teach Carol how to fly it, since it's the "motorcycle" part that's more relevant to driving it than the "flying" part, apparently.
It's not a bad thing to have because an old-school Deathbird has shown up (flowing the orders of some mysterious guy), and when Carol tried to fly under her own power in their first fight, she blacked out and pancaked into the pavement. I'm not sure jumping off the bike while having it ram Deathbird in mid-air was the best approach, seeing as she can't use it to fly if she isn't riding it, but she's new at this, she'll get the hang of it. Also, her asshole neighbor filed a lawsuit to have her evicted. No matter what, always remember average people in the Marvel Universe are terrible.
Tom Foss noted that issue 9 had a panel where they used "diffused", instead of "defused", which is not great work by someone in quality control. Issue 10 had "tunned" when it was supposed to be "tunnel", and come on people, do you not have spell check? I know those things aren't perfect, but even the Blogger's spell check recognizes "tunned" is not a word. Just putting that out there, moving on.I think Andrade does better on maintaining panel-to-panel consistency with character faces over these two issues, though I feel like the shape of Carol's face does shift a lot. How prominent her jaw line is, how far her chin just out, things like that. Beyond that, Andrade overdoes it one the perspective sometimes. There's a panel of Dakota sitting in a chair and calling the cops, and the hand furthest away from us is just miniscule. I don't mind some exaggeration, but that's too much.
Complaints aside, Andrade does bring a lot of energy to the fight scenes, and uses overlapping panels well to carry the eye from one to the other. I thought page 16 in issue 10 was a good example. The panel of Deathbird landing on the roof, slightly overlaps the one above of Carol clocking her with the heavy bag, and heavily overlaps the next panel of Deathbird rising as Carol winds up again. The panel below that has the characters in the same places relative to each other, but uses the "SLIIIIIIICCEE" sound effect and the torn heavy bag to draw the eye down to the next panel, which is slightly overlapped by the one following it, with the knife-feathers rushing towards Carol. There's another good bit on the next page at the bottom, with the closeup of Carol's hand and Deathbird's face, leading into a larger panel of Carol blasting Deathbird, where it's like we've been thrown back by the force of it, just as the panel borders have been pushed outwards.
I also notice that through the first half of #10, Andrade sticks to mostly square or rectangular panels. The number and layout shifts, but otherwise they're pretty similar. Once Deathbird kicks Carol off the roof and the fight starts, Andrade starts using a lot of slanted panels with either 2 or zero parallel sides, trapezoids (or trapeziums, if you're in the UK, apparently, who knew?). I can't detect a pattern to it, where the narrow side is the one the action originates from, or it's the side Carol's on. It produces a see-saw effect down the page, moving you from side to side, so maybe it's supposed to represent shifts in momentum. It stops when Carol decides to fly after Deathbird, Andrade goes back to square and rectangles, because the fight is effectively over, I guess. Once Carol tried to fly, she was beat. So Andrade has some interesting compositional beats, but needs to improve drawing characters consistently.
I don't know if it's Andrade's inks of Bellaire's colors, but the frequent use of shadow, or outline for Deathbird's a nice touch. Plays up the "bird of prey" aspect to have her silhouetted or shadowed. Death from above, and all that.
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