Battle Chasers #11 // Review
Red Monika is exhausted. She’s just climbed out of a life-or-death hell, and now she’s wondering how much of the blood on the ground is hers. It’s fallen in kind of a strange pattern on the ground that’s pretty far from where she rests. The question of the blood becomes academic as a strange form in the periphery turns out to be a major threat in Battle Chasers #11. Writer Joe Madureira continues an exhilarating return to a series that has been dormant for years with artist Ludo Lullabi. It’s a brilliantly stylish, action-heavy issue that continues to impress.
Red Monika might find it a bit easier to cope with the monster she’s facing were it not for the fact that she has come to find herself...alone. Her companion Garrison is dealing with other issues in other places. It’s very much a life-or-death struggle for him as he confronts something that he can only adequately face by tapping into the power of his cursed blade. It’s a powerful magical artifact, but is it really any defense against someone who has been enchanted into a living weapon? Monika and Garrison will have a great deal to discuss if they ever find themselves together again.
There’s a primal, sweeping sense of action about the two scenes that make up the eleventh issue of the series. Madureira wields a remarkably deft understanding of how big the action needs to be to move a couple of scenes from one cover to the other in the course of a single issue. There’s so little story being delivered in a single issue, but it scarcely seems to matter as the action is given SO much space to slam and slice its way across the page.
All the space for all of the action is filled quite brilliantly by Lullabi. Action shoots across the page covered in a misty, atmospheric moodiness that can feel absolutely electrifying in places. The immersiveness of the action is kind of impressive when one considers how little there is in the way of background. Lullabi is focusing so narrowly on the action from so many different angles that there really isn’t an opportunity to establish anything about the battle sites. In spite of this, Lullabi’s use of shading and color grants all of the action a beautiful sense of weight, form, and radiance.
The only problem with Madureira’s pacing is that it takes SO LONG for a plot to develop. A typical writer might have chosen to try to cram both #10 and #11 into a single normal-length issue. With Lullabi as the artist, it could have even worked that way, but Madureira’s a lot more patient than that, and what results is gorgeous in places. (Red Monika continues to be fairly dazzling even in the presence of a giant monster.) It’s kind of difficult to feel an emotional connection with much of what’s going on on the page, though the series has been back for two months now and very little has happened. It looks really, really good, though.
