The third issue of Farscape: D'Argo's Lament (Keith R.A. DeCandido) is a tragic squandering of fannish potential. Much of the issue is spent in flashback, as Ka D'Argo tells a shipmate the epic tale of his youth, signing up for the Luxan army, his first experiences in war and how he met his doomed love, Lo'laan. At last, an official Farscape story fleshes out the hints and teases the series' fans picked up over the show's four years on TV.
Only it isn't epic, and it doesn't flesh anything out. The plot and dialogue are bland and spare, adding little information and no emotion at all to the character's known backstory. And Neil Edwards' sketchy, underdeveloped art compounds the problem. Time and again in this issue, he's given great material to draw; however flawed the script, a strong artist could still have turned the basic set-ups into something truly special. Yet instead he turns an intergalactic war into a pedestrian affair. A two-page spread is wasted on a boxy spaceship, some warriors standing around with their hands at their side, and some faces squinting in close-up. D'Argo and his fellow Luxans, brought so fantastically to life on television by the Jim Henson Company, all look the same. The greatest tragedy in this book is that it marks the first appearance of the dreaded Scorvians, who are mentioned a few times in the TV series but kept off-camera. Edwards gets to design a classic Farscape baddie for the first time, and what he gives us are four green dudes with Bart Simpson heads in featureless black unitards. It's unitarded.*
With the infinite budget of comic books, DeCandido and Edwards somehow manage to confine D'Argo's Lament to a soundstage Doctor Who would've laughed at in the '70s.
- JC
[*Direct all complaints to me. JC asked me to take it out but I was laughing too hard to find the delete key. - RD]
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment