Reviews: The Spirit #14 and Orson Randall And The Green Mist of Death
With the new creative team's first issue of The Spirit, the title seems thrown back almost instantly, drawing a bit too much inspiration from Eisner's original material. This isn't a bad comic, really, merely "competent" when once I found it enthralling. Evanier and Aragonés provide a script that hits many of the right spots, with the exception of Dolan's sudden devolution into a complete moron and a too-heavy bit with Ebony and the laptop. With Ploog choosing to directly emulate Eisner (with whom he worked in the 70s,) a lot of of the title's recent momentum is lost due to a too-retro style that ends up making this feel like one of the lesser stories from The Spirit: The New Adventures.
I'm not reading The Immortal Iron Fist as a regular title, preferring to wait for the trades, but I picked up Orson Randall And The Green Mist of Death on a whim and am glad for it. A "Previously" page catches curious readers up nicely before showing them slices from the Golden Age Iron Fist's life and his multiple entanglements with The Prince of Orphans. Fraction's disjointed narrative style serves the story well and the art for each segment, provided by a broad selection of creators - the Allreds, Nick Dragotta, Russ Heath, Lewis LaRosa, and Stefano Guadino - does the job very, very nicely. Part Indiana Jones, part The Escapist, and a fine piece of comics work from everyone involved.
