Customer Reviews

Freakangels, Vol. 2

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Warren Ellis has created a post-apocalyptic England where the new and the old clash in perfect proportion. Imagine the children of Village of the Damned have grown up... The story, in inimitable Ellis style, features not just physical conflicts with enemy powers, but also the day-to-day conflicts of personalities trying to get along with each other while exploring amazing powers that even their owners can't fully understand. Top off the story with the gorgeous art of Paul Duffield and you have one of the best graphic novels of all time. These are the kinds of books that make me jealous of anyone getting to read them for the first time, because you never know what you are going to find when you turn the next page. Enjoy! (P.S. Buy the hardbacks; you will want to re-read these...)

volume 2 of this series was decidedly not as good as the first. i actually had to check it was the same artist as volume 1, 'cuz it was just less visually compelling (though still beautiful, and with a lovely color palette). it's prolly more like a 3.5 star, but i'll round up for keeping me interested enough to get the next one.
builds on previous story and you get to know the characters better, but there is no subtlety to the way things unfold... just BLAM, here's each character's deal. i hear they get better again- i hope so!

Like Whyndham's Midwich Kukoos, those violet-eyed mutants were hunted and chased for their powers. Their communal "LEAVE US ALONE" in an outburst of power was so powerful as to unwittingly bring about apocalypse. And now those twelve, in a flooded London. are to come to terms with the world they involuntarily create. They keep the Whitechapel survivors under their protection. Unlike the Midwich Cuckoos, each of them has a different personality, more than often clashing with the others: Connor the androgyne chronicler, the aggressively female engineer KK, the irritable watcher Kirk, the viperine outcast Luke,the spiritually inclined, sweet Arkady, the somewhat sexophobic gardener Karl who wears a tin helmet to avoid other's talk of sex, the scientist Caz, Miki the concerned doctor, Sirkka the group sex expert who keeps an harem of boys and girls, her somewhat estranged lover , the scavenger Jack, and and the paranoid "police officer" Kaitlin, who love "Quincy" And there was a sociopath Mak who was ouste from the group. The story of those persons is inserted in a postapocalypti scenario, marvelously depicted by Duffeld. A magnificent graphic novel!

If you are a fun, you already know what it is about. If you are not, you are probably about to become one! Excellent work from two masters of the kind. I would not be able to favour either the story or the graphics, they are both amazing. And although anyone can read it for free at the Freakangels site ([...]), for a fun of the spieces it's a must have!
Watch out for V3

I was put off by the art in the first volume, but it seems to have actually devolved in volume two. The artist is a very good colorist (honestly), and some of the drawings of the town are really nice, but the figure work is lacking. Poorly drawn hands, stiff poses, ugly faces (and not even consistently ugly, either), repetitive talking head panels (and we're talking about quarter-page panels, too) - it kept pulling me out of the story. Even by manga-influenced art standards, it's not up to snuff.

And that's the biggest problem, I definitely want to read Warren Ellis comics, but it would be nice if he was working with artists that were as good as what they did as he is at what he does. As it is, I'm definitely not reading the third volume, simply because after two volumes, I'm already too frustrated with the art to continue.