35 Books in 30 Days 3: Kickback by David Lloyd

Kickback

Kickback is a stylish piece about a corrupt cop on a corrupt police force in a corrupt city. It’s by David Lloyd, the co-creator of V for Vendetta. According to an interview on Newsarama, the story sat in his drawer for seven years before being sold to a publisher in France (and eventually brought to Dark Horse this year).

It needed a few more years in the drawer.

Do you know how much it pains me to not like a story by Lloyd? V for Vendetta has long been one of my favorite graphic novels. Lloyd’s done a lot of great work over the years; his covers on the Marvel series Madrox were some of the best any publisher put out that year. Lloyd uses cinematic chiaroscuro to build his noir scenes (or at least that’s what Wikipedia says; after all, my degree’s in math, not art). That style works perfectly with stories of conflicted men in impossible situations, struggling against the darkness in themselves and in society.

The problem in Kickback is that we don’t really have those sort of characters in this story. We’re supposed to, after all; Joe Canelli is supposed to be a cop on the take suddenly faced with a gruesome crime spree that’s the by-product of the corruption in the city. But we never see the dark side of Canelli here. He’s always stone-jawed, doing what’s right, fighting to find out the truth behind the murders. He’s also supposed to be torn apart by some repressed memories of his parents’ death, but we really don’t get that struggle from him. In short, we’ve got a dull lead, and no amount of chiaroscuro and moody color can overcome that weight.

The art’s nice enough, but there’s a sinister threat lurking on the page: the lettering. Ooh, it made my eyes hurt. Remember how I said that this story was originally published in France? It’s obvious that the English lettering was slapped on here, and it really disrupts the reader’s ability to dwell in Lloyd’s murkish drawings. Take a look at these two cell phone drawings:

goodcell
badcell
The top drawing shows a cell phone drawing with hand lettering. The information is conveyed to the reader unobtrusively. The text looks like it fits in the world Lloyd draws. The bottom drawing uses a digital font that looks awkward and breaks the reader from the comic’s setting. And this example is in proper perspective; there’s a few times where the letters don’t fit the perspective of the object it labels. The dialog font is not the easiest to read; the whole thing smells of a poor lettering job.

It’s not fun to give bad reviews to a fantastic artist like David Lloyd. I’m still looking forward to his next work.

Reviewing Kickback
Is hard to do, but I don’t
Have a vendetta
.

Buy this book at Amazon.

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