Murder Inc.: Jagger Rose #3 // Review
Jagger is about to get an offer she can’t refuse. The fact that it’s in VR space is only part of what makes meeting with a bunch of mob bosses so surreal. What they want will be...kind of a big deal and kind of a lot to deal with. Her personal problems are nothing to the rest of the world in Murder Inc.: Jagger Rose #3. Writer Brian Michael Bendis continues a twisted journey into a parallel world with artist Michael Avon Oeming. Color blazes across the page between heavy expanses of darkness courtesy of color artist Taki Soma.
It's a world where the mob managed to gain a foothold in the American government. So the mob bosses in question are larger than life. Of course, in VR space, they want to make a big deal about it, so they’re positively gargantuan next to Jagger Rose as they present her with their offer. Meanwhile, things are going crazy up and down the eastern seaboard of the U.S. American troops have come to reassert governmental dominance over various large cities. They’re no match for the mobs, though. The streets are chaos in something that really looks a hell of a lot like a modern civil war.
Bendis’s dialogue isn’t poetically brutal so much as it is...terse. The series has reached a crucial point, and its plot is really starting to get ugly. However, the surreal nature of the story ultimately undermines the intensity of what's being presented. The dramatic collapse of major authority in the eastern United States doesn't really feel as intense as it could even amidst all of the chaos. There's just too much going on with the mob to really get a full perspective of what's going on in the rest of the world. That perspective is kind of crucial to really understand and feel the full weight of the intensity of what the title character is going through.
Oeming’s art is beautifully heavy. It might not be the case that 90% of the page is just a vast expanse of black. Maybe it's only...like...80% or something. What isn't filled with heavy inking and shadow is given stylishly garish life by Soma’s colors. There is a gorgeousness in the way nearly every panel is laid out. Visually, it can be almost stunning in places when it's not being unspeakably crude. Of course, it's very difficult to bring across the fall intensity and horror of fighting in the streets in a state of urban unrest. Oeming and Soma do their best to put it together and give proper amplification to Bendis’s plot.
It's nightmarish. It's dystopian. And it's kind of fun. But it lacks the central vision that would make it anything more than a strange curiosity. Bendis is clearly tilting toward a sort of Frank Miller Sin City feel in the direction of something that’s at least ostensibly attempting to be a little more political than his work, but it feels kind of like a weak attempt as the series continues.
