Silk #2 // Review
Cindy Moon is looking for the same threat on both sides of the mask. It’s nice when the day job can help out with the night job. It’s not nice when both of the jobs happen to involve fighting a giant talking cat demon that’s likely from Japanese legend. Cindy can handle it, though. Cindy’s also Silk. She enters the second issue of her current series in another wittily-written chapter of her life brought to the page by writer Maurene Goo. Talented artist Takeshi Miyazawa swings Silk through combat and intrigue with the style, poise, and form that made him such an asset to Spider-Gwen in the recent past.
One of Cindy’s colleagues is taking a meeting at a place called the Level Up Arcade. Sounds like a fun time until one takes into account the fact that he’s meeting with a group of criminals who refer to themselves as “the Cannibals.” Cindy drops by as Silk to make sure everything is okay. She was expecting “Cannibals,” but she might not have been expecting large cat demon. It’s there to attack the Cannibals. Silk wants to make sure that no one gets killed. If she can survive that, she’s going to have another matter to contend with: a new therapist she immediately find herself developing a crush on.
Goo continues to layer the life of Cindy/Silk with clever alternations between life in and out of the mask. The pacing of the series seems to be alternating from work to mask to home to therapist with just enough time in each corner of her life. It all feels remarkably well-rounded. Rarely is the life of a hero given quite this much of a sense of balance without falling into the drudgery of a forced outline. Goo makes Cindy’s life seem fluid even as she’s alternating quite vigorously through the different ends of her life. It’s a very well-balanced series so far.
Miyazawa has a brilliant grasp of subtlety and nuance in drama that serves the series well. So much of what Cindy is dealing with now rests outside the mask. And that which rests IN the mask continues to move across the page with a powerfully kinetic sense of action. Miyazawa somehow manages the bewilderingly complicated task of rendering relative sizes in a fight between Cindy and a creature twice her size that is ALSO solidly grounded in the confined physical space of an old-school video arcade. Any artist would want to make a tangle in that space seem bigger than a video arcade would allow, but Miyazawa makes it realistic. What’s more: the artist manages this without obscuring the action at all. It’s a hell of a puzzle to figure out, but Miyazawa manages it brilliantly.
The first two chapters are finished. Goo and Miyazawa make a great team as more is revealed about the life of a seriously charming web-slinger. Every generation, there’s an attempt to update the wall-crawling crime fighter formula that was developed by Steve Ditko for Marvel back in the 1960s. The attempts have met with mixed success. Goo nails the update perfectly in the first two issues of the new series.
