W0rldtr33 #2 // Review
Nicky says that they’re “really into naked murder ladies at the FBI.” His partner Agent Silk tells him to cool it. They’re interrogating a witness about a mass murder, and his tone might not exactly be helping. The good news is that the kid identified the suspect they were expecting. There’s a lot more going on, though, as the mystery continues in W0rldtr33 #2. Writer James Tynion IV continues to expand his cyberpunk murder horror procedural in an issue that is rendered to the page by artist Fernando Blanco. Stylishly under-saturated color casts a ghostly glow over the action courtesy of Jordie Bellaire.
While Nick and Silk interrogate the witness, there are people at the scene of the crime. An interested third party is looking into the mass murder in question. Meanwhile, Amanda is talking with a guy she’s getting to know. It’s not exactly a date. They’re wandering around the perimeter of a house at night. She wants to date him, though. And she wants to lay all of her weird stuff on the table right away so that he knows what she’s up against. Then she wants him to do the same, but there’s a problem. There appear to be people in the house Amanda and the guy are about to burn down...
Tynion is throwing a lot at the page in the second issue of the series. He’s taking a step back from the weirdness of the science fiction horror to take a closer look at the psyches of the characters in the ensemble. It seems rather strange to place a character-based issue so close to the establishment of such a strangely familiar and mutated world in the first issue of the series, but it feels like Tynion knows what he’s doing. If nothing else, Tynion’s series of brief scenes make for an interesting progression of character sketches in the second issue.
So much of the issue takes place in darkness at night. Some of it takes place in more sterile and institutional settings like a hotel room and a police station. Due to the heavy nature of Blanco’s inking, Bellaire’s colors can’t draw that strong of a contrast between the exterior at night and interior scenes flooded with light. This is a fairly minor issue, though. Blanco does an excellent job of delivering complicated drama through gloopy masses of ink. There’s so much personality on the page thanks to Blanco’s art. That personality fits Tynion’s writing quite well.
The problem with a mystery serial lies in the slow and steady revelation of aspects of that mystery. A series that is as weird and potentially existential as the one that Tynion is outlining in W0rldtr33 has the potential to go down some pretty absurd paths pretty quickly. The whole thing could collapse into absurdity on any page. It’s impressive that Tynion has managed to hold it together for as long as he has without revealing too much about the plot. It continues to show promise at the end of its second issue.
