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REVIEW! Heathen City Volume 3: Joker to the Thief
15 years ago
Review: Heathen City Volume 3
Preorder Heathen City Volume 3: Joker To the Thief on Furplanet
HC3 is the newest comic in the Heathen City serial, a high-quality graphic novel by my good friend
Alex Vance, and by far my favorite furry comic series.
As you all may know, Heathen City Vol 1 won an Ursa Major award for best graphic novel, but Heathen City Vol 2 missed out. I think this had to do with the complexity of the HC storyline, as Alex really needed to pull back the curtain and build up the dramatic tension in the novel series, but unfortunately it also meant that the timeline for the main plot thread was on pause for an entire issue. I like cliffhangers as much as the next guy, but waiting two years for the resolution to HC1's's titanic meeting between Q. I. Malloy and Tony Caulfield was agonizing!
Well, I should let you know then that I was extremely privileged to get my hands on a pre-release copy of Alex Vance's Heathen City Vol 3. He said he wanted help proofreading the thing, but to be honest I think he just wanted to gloat to me about how fucking good this comic is.
Alex Vance's prose is known for being equal parts hot, bad-ass, and mysterious. Here he is in rare form, weaving the tale of the aftermath of the Corinthia's destruction, following the clash between Q.I. Malloy's grenades and Tony Caulfield's goons off the coast of Los Angeles. Mistaken for dead by the rescue workers who pulled him out of the water, the dog is rescued by some old friends and makes some new enemies. This time though, everybody's playing for keeps and Malloy is coming into the game hurt.
Tony Caulfield too was seriously injured in the Corinthia's explosion and barely clings to life in a coma, but the secretive alliance of industry moguls that Imelda Caulfield is a part of wants her to tie up loose ends. After all other efforts to revive him have failed, they pressure her to euthanize Tony. Unfortunately they had a plane to catch, so they couldn't wait around to see whether or not it worked.
Needless to say, that's a mistake they won't make twice.
So yeah, the plot is completely kick-ass, and after a quick ramp-up period the action is off the chain! But aside from that, the dialog itself is gripping and intense the whole way down, while still finding time for a quick joke here and some dirty talk there. I won't spoil anything, but the strong characterization of every character in the series was one of the most distinguishing features of Heathen City as a series. Every character in Heathen City 3, even the ones you only meet for a panel, has great personality. That makes volume 3 a pleasure to read from cover-to-cover.
Finally, let's talk about Art. Heathen City 1 was remarkable for being a beautiful, highly-detailed 46-page comic with almost all of the line-work done by one artist,
Ayato, the coloring spread out among four colorists, and with another three artists doing illustration, logos, and the cover art. Because of the uniform line design, the comic had a very good flow between colorists, and there was no mental interruption in the story because of art.
With a similarly huge amount of high-quality work for Heathen City 2, and different plot threads occurring in different times and places, Heathen City 2 used a different artist for each small "story arc", and the different story arcs often had wildly different feels to them. While I greatly enjoyed the stories of Heathen City 2 (especially Tiber Ferrum's at the end of the book) I have always felt like the art styles were too different, and that this took away from the graphic novel in some places.
Which brings us to Heathen City 3. In a nutshell: lesson learned.
At 54 pages, Heathen City 3 remains far too much work for any one artist. Like Heathen City 2, there is no single line-work artist, but there the similarity ends. The different artists have done a fantastic job telling Volume 3's plot arcs in ways that complement each others' work. The small stylistic variations help enhance the continuity of Vance's third volume, mixing flashbacks into action scenes to build even more dramatic tension.
The art is all really fucking good, too.
Vance has found some bewilderingly good artists to mix the right amounts of harshness, tranquility, surrealism, and despair into every panel of every scene. If you're the kind of person who likes to flip through comics just to look at all the pretty pictures, volume 3 delivers on that too. But you're definitely going to want to read this book. Probably a couple times, in fact. When the plot starts touching on the metaphysics of the Heathen City universe, you're going to go nuts over how much is going on beneath reality's placid surface.
And the more you look, the more you will notice subtle details that Alex Vance has hidden in plain sight, and pretty soon you may want to re-read Volumes 1 and 2. You'll be amazed at what you discover.
In short, this comic is a must-read. And at under twenty bucks for the preorder, it's cheaper than some artists' prints. I am totally sold.
Preorder Heathen City Volume 3: Joker To the Thief on Furplanet
Preorder Heathen City Volume 3: Joker To the Thief on Furplanet
HC3 is the newest comic in the Heathen City serial, a high-quality graphic novel by my good friend
Alex Vance, and by far my favorite furry comic series. As you all may know, Heathen City Vol 1 won an Ursa Major award for best graphic novel, but Heathen City Vol 2 missed out. I think this had to do with the complexity of the HC storyline, as Alex really needed to pull back the curtain and build up the dramatic tension in the novel series, but unfortunately it also meant that the timeline for the main plot thread was on pause for an entire issue. I like cliffhangers as much as the next guy, but waiting two years for the resolution to HC1's's titanic meeting between Q. I. Malloy and Tony Caulfield was agonizing!
Well, I should let you know then that I was extremely privileged to get my hands on a pre-release copy of Alex Vance's Heathen City Vol 3. He said he wanted help proofreading the thing, but to be honest I think he just wanted to gloat to me about how fucking good this comic is.
Alex Vance's prose is known for being equal parts hot, bad-ass, and mysterious. Here he is in rare form, weaving the tale of the aftermath of the Corinthia's destruction, following the clash between Q.I. Malloy's grenades and Tony Caulfield's goons off the coast of Los Angeles. Mistaken for dead by the rescue workers who pulled him out of the water, the dog is rescued by some old friends and makes some new enemies. This time though, everybody's playing for keeps and Malloy is coming into the game hurt.
Tony Caulfield too was seriously injured in the Corinthia's explosion and barely clings to life in a coma, but the secretive alliance of industry moguls that Imelda Caulfield is a part of wants her to tie up loose ends. After all other efforts to revive him have failed, they pressure her to euthanize Tony. Unfortunately they had a plane to catch, so they couldn't wait around to see whether or not it worked.
Needless to say, that's a mistake they won't make twice.
So yeah, the plot is completely kick-ass, and after a quick ramp-up period the action is off the chain! But aside from that, the dialog itself is gripping and intense the whole way down, while still finding time for a quick joke here and some dirty talk there. I won't spoil anything, but the strong characterization of every character in the series was one of the most distinguishing features of Heathen City as a series. Every character in Heathen City 3, even the ones you only meet for a panel, has great personality. That makes volume 3 a pleasure to read from cover-to-cover.
Finally, let's talk about Art. Heathen City 1 was remarkable for being a beautiful, highly-detailed 46-page comic with almost all of the line-work done by one artist,
Ayato, the coloring spread out among four colorists, and with another three artists doing illustration, logos, and the cover art. Because of the uniform line design, the comic had a very good flow between colorists, and there was no mental interruption in the story because of art.With a similarly huge amount of high-quality work for Heathen City 2, and different plot threads occurring in different times and places, Heathen City 2 used a different artist for each small "story arc", and the different story arcs often had wildly different feels to them. While I greatly enjoyed the stories of Heathen City 2 (especially Tiber Ferrum's at the end of the book) I have always felt like the art styles were too different, and that this took away from the graphic novel in some places.
Which brings us to Heathen City 3. In a nutshell: lesson learned.
At 54 pages, Heathen City 3 remains far too much work for any one artist. Like Heathen City 2, there is no single line-work artist, but there the similarity ends. The different artists have done a fantastic job telling Volume 3's plot arcs in ways that complement each others' work. The small stylistic variations help enhance the continuity of Vance's third volume, mixing flashbacks into action scenes to build even more dramatic tension.
The art is all really fucking good, too.
Vance has found some bewilderingly good artists to mix the right amounts of harshness, tranquility, surrealism, and despair into every panel of every scene. If you're the kind of person who likes to flip through comics just to look at all the pretty pictures, volume 3 delivers on that too. But you're definitely going to want to read this book. Probably a couple times, in fact. When the plot starts touching on the metaphysics of the Heathen City universe, you're going to go nuts over how much is going on beneath reality's placid surface.
And the more you look, the more you will notice subtle details that Alex Vance has hidden in plain sight, and pretty soon you may want to re-read Volumes 1 and 2. You'll be amazed at what you discover.
In short, this comic is a must-read. And at under twenty bucks for the preorder, it's cheaper than some artists' prints. I am totally sold.
Preorder Heathen City Volume 3: Joker To the Thief on Furplanet
Here's to issue 3, I'll probably have a friend buy me a copy at MFF
I didn't say it in so many words above, but the whole "Anthology of Preludes" style that defined HC2 is completely gone in HC3. I think it makes for a much more engrossing read as a result.