Comic Review: Bedlam #5

            I never even really knew that this comic existed, but because my normal Wednesday routine was thrown on its ear yesterday, I found myself at a shop with all of the usual Marvel and DC offerings, but very little else.  Needless to say, I won’t be much of a patron there going forward.  I basically had to settle on Bedlam because there were no other options.  Here’s how that turned out.

Cover:

            I like the cover image by Fraser Irving as a piece of art.  As a cover, the art works, but the design doesn’t.  Everything is a darker shade of whatever color it is supposed to be.  This would be fine if it was just the image that was involved.  Unfortunately it also extends to all of the text.  While it’s okay in regards to the Image Comics logo (though it does create a strange grey blob in the lower corner), my main problem is that the text blends in with the art way more than it should.  This is especially apparent in the tagline to the comic right underneath the title.  The text itself s so small and so slight that it gets lost.  “Is evil just something you are or something you do?” is a great line, one of the best selling points for the comic, but it should be a little more prominent, or hell, a little more readable at least, in my opinion.

            The grey illustration, illuminated by the pink light in the background provides for a nice uneasiness that goes well with the subject matter. 

5/10 – The illustration is good but as a cover it doesn’t really hold up in my opinion.

Story:

            We start out with a flashback, and come back to those flashbacks as we continue through the issue.  They do a decent job of setting things up within the story, but we are given very little context to start things out.  I don’t really have the time, nor the inclination to count the number of “fucks” in this issue, but it feels almost as excessive and ridiculous as that Walking Dead issue I reviewed.  We are then taken to the present where a creepy guy is teamed up with a cop to catch a serial killer because he’s a “chemist” or something.  It’s weird and not very interesting to tell you the truth.  The flashbacks are relatively interesting but they seem to be building up to the big reveal that the guy behind the mask is actually the individual working with the cop.  I haven’t read any of the other issues but I figured that out within three pages.  Was that actually supposed to be a surprise?  It feels like the writer (Nick Spencer) is trying to do that a lot.  Trying to build things up to a big reveal but, at least to me, they wind up becoming a kind of “duh, of course that happened” kind of moment.  The whole book is incredibly predictable. Even the part where the female cop passes out, I didn’t know for sure how her partner spiked her drink, but I knew that he did.  Therefore, all the grand reveals at the end meant absolutely nothing to me.  Am I the only one that saw these things coming ahead of time?  I couldn’t have been.  The problem is that without the big reveals, everything else is pretty standard and boring. 

2/10 – If everything wasn’t so telegraphed and obvious, Spencer could have had a pretty decent book, unfortunately it suffers from being formulaic and confusing.

Art:

            The art by Riley Rossmo is sketchy and gritty which works well with the subject matter.  The problem is that it is just graphically unappealing to me.  I know that some people may like it, but it feels like and unrefined Ashley Wood.  I thought (and hoped) that the art would grow on me throughout the book as something that is so far outside of my comfort zone generally does.  Unfortunately here it does not. 

            Technically it is decent.  The storytelling is effective and efficient, and everything is anatomically and proportionally correct.  I love the way that the regular present day time (in color) is split from the flashback (grey toned with splashes of red).  I am not sure who’s call it was to do it like that but it was very smart.  With the grey and red signifying his life in the sanitarium perfectly, and the color showing him leading more of a vibrant life.  It feels more like a storyboard for a movie than it does an actual comic book though and I wish they would have paid a bit more attention to making it successful in its current incarnation than in looking ahead. 

It's pretty bad when my favorite piece of artwork is what adorns the back cover.

 3/10 – Good color choices are nearly negated by what looks like a rushed inking job.

Overall:  4/10 – I know that getting your stories and ideas picked up for other mediums is where the big money is made, but if your comic book is not that good then a movie probably won’t get made from it.  The moral of the story is: don’t get your comics in a shop that has devoted ¾ of it’s space to overpriced toys.