The Brave and the Uncomfortably Adolescent

More Brave & Bold. This is from #17, by Marv Wolfman and Phil Winslade. The story, which concludes in #18, is pretty good, aside from being pretty repetitive. It features a callback to Triumph, the widely-loathed post-Zero Hour JLA continuity implant, which is an interesting choice, and it's done in an interesting, if meta, way.

Really quite nice art. Winslade does full art, which allows him some extra freedom to mix it up a bit; there's some pencil-only work, some fully-inked stuff, some CGI. The pencils-only stuff reminds me of Gene Colan in a good way. There's a lot of digital stuff in the second half, including a nice effect using a blown-up pixilated greyscale icon.

That character who, if I've remembered my 1994-era HTML correctly, is over to the right? That's Raven. This is not the Raven I'm familiar with! But then I'm probably a solid twenty years off being current with Titans continuity. This is a scene from the halls of "Strages Academy, a private school in San Francisco". "Strages" sounds like a bird pun, but a quick search didn't turn up anything obvious. The closest I got was the strigiformes, but those are owls, not corvids. I am a bit doubtful that a private school would permit students to dress like that, but perhaps this is conservative for San Francisco. Also, Raven's in several other panels on this page, in which the details of her outfit are consistent. Note that Raven's boot-to-hem length is about half-a-head longer than her hem-to-crown length. Ah, comic book anatomy, how we are ... well, kind of creeped out by, often.

And then there's this image, from the very next panel, on the following page. That's, um, that's some fine artistic continuity there, Phil.

Good catch by colorist Chris Chuckay, actually; Raven's skin is colored consistently, and the netting is colored consistently, even when the two are not placed consistently.

Posted by Greg at November 15, 2009 10:04 AM