Siren's Gate #2 // Review
Tara is being taken to see Ms. Rose. It’s a good thing, too--there was someone who had been told to kill her. Nearly had a clean shot at her before she was approached. And now Tara is being taken to Ms. Rose to talk about that time she died. Things are complicated for Tara, and they’re only going to get more complicated in Sirens Gate #2. Writer/artist Shannon Maer continues to delve into an interesting story in a bit of a choppy series of moments that feel quite beautiful on the page. The second issue leaves a lot of mystery in the margins.
The mystery that Tara finds herself in is defined a little more. There’s a woman in a wheelchair in some shadowy corner of the world. It’s her last day on the job as Commander Rein. Theoretically, it could be a perfectly normal goodbye to the job. Strange energies come into play that make this impossible. Later on, Tara is running away from Ms. Rose. There’s danger there in the shadows that will catch up with her. It’s really only a matter of time before that danger overcomes her. It’ll probably be okay: she’s been dead before.
Maer keeps the dialogue to a minimum. There are so many questions as to what exactly it is that’s going on. A few scenes play out in a way that suggests that there is a dark magic at work, but it’s difficult to tell quite exactly what it is that’s going on as the world of Sirens Gate still hasn’t been defined enough to really show much of anything coherent. It’s just a series of scenes so far. There isn’t a whole lot to connect them up. Thankfully, Maer makes them interesting enough to keep the pages turning.
Maer carries the visual magic of Sirens Gate exclusively through the night. The world that’s being presented doesn’t feel terribly lived in. It feels like a series of covers to cheap supernatural horror novels. There isn’t a lot of motion from one panel to the next. But it all looks quite appealing, even if it doesn’t always feel natural. The drama feels more than a bit stiff when it really needs to explode off the page to capture the intensity of what’s going on. Maer’s visuals don’t have any trouble drawing in the reader. The challenge is to maintain their interest once they get there.
There’s more than enough in the first couple of issues of Sirens Gate to suggest that there’s something special coming in future issues, but it doesn’t seem to add up to much. Tara seems intriguing. Ms. Rose has a fascinating dramatic dynamic to her, but it all feels so distant as every moment seems to be staged in some kind of shadowy vacuum. It all looks cool, but Maer doesn’t seem to be pulling it together well enough to get it to feel like much more than it is.
