Silk #4 // Review
Cindy Moon has come to an abandoned building to meet with someone who has turned out to be the notorious crime boss Silvermane. He wants to tell her a story. It's not the safest place for a young journalist to conduct an interview. (Zoom would have been better.) Thankfully, Cindy's capable of defending herself as the masked title hero of Silk #4. Writer Maurene Goo gets a bit thick with the backstory and ancillary elements to the central plot in her fourth outing as Moon's chronicler. Artist Takeshi Miyazawa continues to wow with a deft understanding of action, motion, and composition aided by colorist Ian Herring.
Saya has proven to be a bit of a danger to the young journalist Cindy Moon. Saya knows Moon's secret identity as the superhero known as Silk. Cindy got a hot tip on information that might be able to give her leverage over Saya...that informant turned out to be organized crime lord Silvermane. While Cindy deals with that, Saya deals with a problem of her own: the cat demon that she's been working with is trying to take over the planet as it has become apparent that humans aren't doing a terribly good job of being the dominant life-form.
Maurine Goo's delicate balance and rhythm with Cindy Moon falters a bit this installment. Moon's life in and out of the mask takes to the panels' corners as Goo focuses on major supporting characters and villains who aren't nearly as interesting as she is. Moon IS interesting for the duration of her time on the page, but the fourth issue of Goo's run with the character doesn't spend nearly enough time with her to keep the momentum of the serial from stagnating a bit this issue. That being said, Silvermane and Saya and the cat demon are all interesting enough to keep the pages turning, but there is DEFINITELY a loss of velocity in issue #4.
Miyazawa is given a lot of backstory and drama to deal with this chapter that doesn't properly harness his ability to tell a story dynamically. The drama makes it to the page relatively well seeped as it is in an impressively atmospheric background, but without more of a driving force behind the action, it feels a bit dead. Moon comes across as suitably heroic out of the mask and in over her head, which goes a long way towards making the issue feel appealing. Herring's colors lend extra weight to the atmosphere and rather stylishly render moments of Silvermane's backstory in gold highlighted blues, grays, and purples.
Goo is an experienced author in narrative prose, but it's maddeningly difficult to get the rhythm just perfect on one issue per month of a comic book. The story that she's delivering here is interesting enough in its own right, but it's not terribly satisfying as a part of the longer run of a series that's still in its infancy. The extended family of characters that Goo is working with ARE interesting, but a bit more of the title character in issue #4 would have been a lot more satisfying.
